Researchers have found that elephants understand pointing and can use it to interact with their surroundings, such as finding food.
This may not seem like a great feat to some, but most monkeys do not automatically understand pointing without any instruction, a Cell Press news release reported.
"By showing that African elephants spontaneously understand human pointing, without any training to do so, we have shown that the ability to understand pointing is not uniquely human but has also evolved in a lineage of animal very remote from the primates," Richard Byrne of the University of St Andrews, said.
He said elephants are part of the African radiation of animals that incudes species like the aardvark and manatee.
"What elephants share with humans is that they live in an elaborate and complex network in which support, empathy, and help for others are critical for survival. It may be only in such a society that the ability to follow pointing has adaptive value, or, more generally, elephant society may have selected for an ability to understand when others are trying to communicate with them, and they are thus able to work out what pointing is about when they see it," Byrne said.
The researchers observed a group of elephants used that were accustom to vocal commands but had never been trained to respond to pointing.
"Of course, we always hoped that our elephants would be able to learn to follow human pointing, or we'd not have carried out the experiments," Anna Smet, who participated in the study and also conducts elephant rides, said. "What really surprised us is that they did not apparently need to learn anything. Their understanding was as good on the first trial as the last, and we could find no sign of learning over the experiment."
The researchers found no difference in the ability to understand pointing between elephants that had extensive human contact and those that did not.
One theory is the elephants use a form of pointing to communicate within their own species, which would explain why they understood it so naturally.
"Elephants are cognitively much more like us than has been realized, making them able to understand our characteristic way of indicating things in the environment by pointing," Byrne said. "This means that pointing is not a uniquely human part of the language system."
