Revealed, why it’s only elephants that can see your point
IT’S often said they never forget – now it seems elephants have another claim to fame.
A study has found that the giant mammals instinctively understand what pointing means.
While this may not seem surprising, they may be the only creatures, apart from man, capable of the feat.
Even chimpanzees, whose intelligence has been compared with that of elephants, struggle to understand that something which is being pointed at may be of interest.
The St Andrews University researchers behind the study said their findings suggest that elephants are more on our wavelength than we realise.
Researcher Professor Richard Byrne said: ‘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.’
In their experiment, he and his team studied whether African elephants which give tourists rides near Victoria Falls, in Zimbabwe, would choose to investigate a bucket that was pointed to, or a second one a few feet away. They discovered the elephants chose the correct bucket almost 70 per cent of the time – significantly more often than through chance.
The result could not be explained by the animals being used to being around people, as the guides who run the trips use spoken rather than visual commands to control them.
What is more, the elephants were found to be as good at interpreting pointing the first time they tried at as the last, suggesting it is an innate talent, rather than learned, talent. Co-researcher Anna Smet said: ‘We always hoped that our elephants would be able to l earn to follow human pointing, or we’d not have carried out the experiments.
‘What really surprised us is that they did not apparently need to learn anything.’
Writing i n the j ournal Current Biology, the team also said that the animals may even make a ‘pointing’ gesture themselves, by using their trunks.
No other wild animal is known to instinctively understand pointing.
Professor Byrne said: ‘ By showing that African elephants spontaneously understand human pointing, without any training, 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.
‘Elephants are cognitively much more like us than has been realised.’