Elephant

Elephants can recognise the gender and ethnicity of human voices

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Wild elephants can recognise the gender and ethnicity of a person just by listening to the sound of their voice, a new study has found.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Sussex found the animals demonstrated more fear when they heard the voices of adult Masai men, compared to Kamba men.

Karen McComb, a professor of animal behaviour and cognition at the University of Sussex, and her colleagues at the University went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans.

“Basically they have developed this very rich knowledge of the humans that they share their habitat with,” Prof McComb explained.

The scientists used voice recordings of Maasai men, who on occasion come into conflict with elephants, and Kamba men, who are less of a threat to the animals.

The recordings contained the same phrase in two different languages: “Look over there. A group of elephants is coming.”

The elephants reacted more defensively by retreating and gathering in a bunch to the Maasai language recording because it was associated with the more threatening human tribe, according to the study co-author Graeme Shannon, of Colorado State University.

“They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human language skills,” Mr Shannon said. “They’re able to acquire quite detailed knowledge. The only way of doing this is with an exceptionally large brain.”

They repeated the experiment with recordings of Maasai men and women. Since women rarely spear elephants, the animals reacted less to the women’s voices. The same thing happened when they substituted their voices with the voices of young boys.

“Making this kind of fine distinctions in human voice patterns is quite remarkable,” said Emory University animal cognition expert Frans de Waal, who was not part of the study.

The study was published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Elephants ‘understand human gesture’

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In this brief clip of two of the trials, Professor Richard Byrne describes how the elephants got the point from the first test.

African elephants have demonstrated what appears to be an instinctive understanding of human gestures, according to UK scientists.

In a series of tests, researcher Ann Smet, of the University of St Andrews, offered the animals a choice between two identical buckets, then pointed at the one containing a hidden treat.

From the first trial, the elephants chose the correct bucket.

Animal keeper Rachel Melling describes the bond she feels with the elephants she works with and how they “respond to body language”.

The scientists worked with captive elephants at a lodge in Zimbabwe.

Prof Richard Byrne, a co-author on the research, said the elephants had been rescued from culling operations and trained for riding.

“They specifically train the elephants to respond to vocal cues. They don’t use any gestures at all,” said Prof Byrne.

“The idea is that the handler can walk behind the elephant and just tell it what to do with words.”

Despite this, the animals seemed to grasp the meaning of pointing from the outset. This makes them the only non-human animals to understand the gesture without being trained to do so.

In previous studies, Prof Byrne said, our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees, proved to be “hopeless” at at similar task.

Ms Smet added that she had been impressed by the animals’ apparently innate understanding of the gesture.

“Of course we had hoped that the elephants would be able to learn to follow human pointing, or we wouldn’t have done the experiment in the first place,” she said.

“But it was really surprising that they didn’t seem to have to learn anything.

“It seems that understanding pointing is an ability elephants just possess naturally and they are cognitively much more like us than has been realised.”

Nature’s giants

  • African elephants are the largest living land animals
  • Until recently there was one species of elephant in Africa – but they are now classified as either forest or bush (or savannah) elephants
  • Forest elephants, as the name suggests, are found in equatorial forests and have straighter trunks and rounded ears
  • Bush elephants are more widespread, mostly south of the Sahara in a range of habitats including savannah, swamps and deserts

Prof Byrne said studying elephants helped build a map of part of the evolutionary tree that is very distant from humans.

“They’re so unrelated to us,” he told BBC News. “So if we find human-like abilities in an animal like an elephant, that hasn’t shared a common ancestor with people for more than 100 million years , we can be pretty sure that it’s evolved completely separately, by what’s called convergent evolution.”

The researchers said their findings might explain how elephants have successfully been tamed and have “historically had a close bond with humans, in spite of being potentially dangerous and unmanageable due to their great size”.

But the scientists added the results could be a hint that the animals gesture to one another in the wild with their “highly controllable trunks”.

Ms Smet told BBC News: “The next step [in our research] is to test whether when an elephant extends its trunk upwards and outwards – as they regularly do, such as when detecting a predator, this functions as a point.”