Elephants Understand Pointing Better Than Chimps
Elephants understand us better than we think. Photo used with permission by Anna Smet, all rights reserved.
It could be argued that, as the elephants are used to human contact, they somehow learnt what pointing means from their handlers. However, the 11 elephants used in this study were trained to respond to vocal commands only. Smet observed the elephants over several months and their handlers never used gestures of any kind to direct them.
What’s more, the elephants’ ability to understand human pointing did not vary with how long they had lived with people, nor whether they were born in captivity or in the wild.
If the subject elephants learnt to understand pointing from their past experiences, it remained a mystery when and how.
Adapting to Domestication
The results also prompted researchers to speculate about what traits make certain species more adaptable to human company than others. The debate continues about domestication, with some researchers defending that domestication makes animals more acceptable of humans.
In contrast, Byrne defends it’s quite the opposite. “Rather than requiring domestication to change the cognition of wild animals in a human-like direction, it may be that we only ever managed to domesticate animals that were already able to understand our communicative intentions.”
Complex Social Networks: Pointing May Be in Elephant’s Natural Vocabulary
Humans and elephants are distantly related, which means it is most likely that the ability to understand pointing has evolved separately, and not from a shared ancestor. The question remains: why would elephants develop this ability to understand pointing? As elephants live in a complex social network, Byrne speculates that pointing is needed for elephants to communicate. “Pointing, or something roughly equivalent, might be part of their natural communication system – perhaps uniquely in the animal world. It would be great to test whether this hypothesis is true!” says Byrne.
Elephants are able to make many different gestures with their trunks, and Byrne and Smet are hoping to continue their research to determine whether pointing means anything in elephant society.
Resources
Anna F. Smet, Richard W. Byrne. African Elephants Can Use Human Pointing Cues to Find Hidden Food. (2013). Current Biology. Accessed October 13, 2013.
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Alligators point in two directions, so what does the elephant do if it sees an alligator?
It took them two hundred years to figure this out?
Considering how close the pachyderm – the end of its trunk, particularly – is to the buckets (if the accompanying photo. is representative), it actually looks like the elephant is getting ready to reward the human… for pointing at the correct bucket.
Point to a solution and I bet obamma won’t understand.
He keeps pointing at the elephants; but, they keep acting like they don’t have any idea what he’s pointing at.
Pointedly won’t understand.
yet another anomaly in the evolutionary paradigm
Very Cool!
I think I’ll use this for my “Current Events” Social Studies Project!
Do you imagine that a human baby would perceive static symbols as directions?
A significant & troubling number of human adults have that same problem with traffic signs.
my pet Cockatiel understands pointing
And dogs have compassion where few humans and no politicians do.
My dog is so smart he even cleans the cat’s box.
LOL. Makes a couple of my dogs really smart, too, in a gross kind of way.
I had someone’s dog eat my chili once, after I at it.
Cancer research all finished ?
Because we’d get so much further if we only worked on just one problem at a time and didn’t bother to understand anything else. 8 billion cancer scientists, because why bother with any other problem,
Did they consider elephant’s keen sense of smell, which could be about 10 times stronger than that of a dog?
I hear that. If my nose were 8 feet long, I’d probably be able to pick the one with the food – blindfolded.
I’m not a scientist, I’m an artist so I like to make guesses based on exciting news like this. When I learned dogs are the only animal which understand pointing, I was very fascinated. Now to find that elephants understand it, I wonder if it is because of the long trunks of their noses. If you have a long nose, you can see it in your field of vision, though very blurry and you don’t usually pay attention to it. If you are taking pictures as a model, you can use your nose position to better gauge the position of your eyes and chin to make them balanced and symmetric. So I wonder if the very large trunks of the elephant, paired with the other essential biological functions of the trunk, act as pointers in their elephant world. A human arm might sort of resemble a trunk in its proportion and in that the arm retrieves objects, especially food. But I’m just flat out-guessing here 🙂 Perhaps there is an even more fascinating explanation awaiting our discovery. Science is so inspiring to me!
I’ll bet when they get ‘confused’ it’s because they think we’re trying to bullshit them… they probably, routinely, play practical jokes amongst themselves, by attempting to fool each other into looking where(ever) they point.
Do the elephants naturally communicate in the wild by using their trunks to point?
That depends upon one’s point of view.
Something tells me that ‘we’ are – just now, empirically – ‘discovering’ something… which the people who live among and around elephants have known for millennia.
Every time we learn more of just how intelligent the elephant and dolphin really are, it just makes it more tragic as we continue to slaughter them.
67.5%…