Elephants Understand The Human Pointing Gesture Without Training

Elephants undrstand the human pointing gesture and use it as a cue to trace food, according to a new finding.

Researchers at the University of St. Andrews revealed that elephants spontaneously understand the gesture of human pointing and use it as an important cue to find their food. This ability of the elephants sets them apart from other animals including chimpanzees, who fail to understand the gesture.

"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 in a statement.

To prove their finding, the researchers Byrne and study author Anna Smet conducted a study on 11 captive elephants that belonged to a Safari company near Victoria Falls in South Africa, whose job was to take tourists on rides. These animals were trained to just follow vocal commands but pointing was something these animals were not accustomed to.

In the tests conducted, the researchers placed two buckets before the elephant. Out of the two buckets one contained food and the experimenter pointed at the bucket that had food in it. In the first trial, after conducting the pointing experiment the researchers watched which bucket the elephants approached first. They were surprised to see that in the first trial the elephants followed the experimenters pointing and moved to the bucket that had food.

"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," Smet says.

Like humans the elephants live in a complex network in which empathy and support is important for survival. The researchers assume that only in such a society the gesture of pointing has an adaptive value. Or maybe the elephant society selected the ability to follow pointing in order to communicate.

The elephants born in captivity have similar experience to the ones born in wild when it comes to understanding the pointing gesture.

Byrne and Smet claim that, "it is possible that elephants may do something akin to pointing as a means of communicating with each other, using their long trunk. Elephants do regularly make prominent trunk gestures, but it remains to be seen whether those motions act in elephant society as 'points.'"

This study published in the journal Current Biology, highlights an important aspect that pointing is solely not a part of the human language system.