Elephants Understand Pointing Too, Even With Little Prior Training

Pointing may seem a simple gesture, but try communicating it across species — it becomes frustrating and nearly impossible in many cases. To that end, elephants are remarkable; not only are they not domesticated, but new research published Oct. 10 shows how well they understand the human gesture of pointing, shedding insights on their complex understanding of communicative gestures.

Elephants have worked alongside humans for thousands of years, but the largest land animals on Earth have never been technically domesticated like dogs or goats, making their intuition even more amazing. Even highly intelligent animals such as chimpanzees have great difficulty interpreting human gestures.

"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," said Richard Byrne from the University of St Andrews. "This means that pointing is not a uniquely human part of the language system."

The group of researchers tested 11 African elephants on their ability to recognize humans pointing. Despite no extensive prior exposure to such a gesture, the elephants were able to quickly grasp the meaning behind a human pointing.

"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," said Byrne.

"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."

You can read the full published study detailing the findings in the journal Current Biology.