In a groundbreaking study published this week, researchers have uncovered evidence suggesting that elephants possess a remarkable ability to recognize and address one another using individual names. The study, conducted by researchers from Colorado State University, Save the Elephants, and ElephantVoices, among others, analyzed 469 rumbles – the low-frequency calls made by African elephants – from wild elephants in Kenya.
Employing artificial intelligence techniques, the researchers discovered a "name-like" component within these rumbles that individual elephants recognized and responded to when replayed. According to the paper, published in the prestigious Nature Ecology and Evolution journal, elephants approached more quickly, vocalized sooner, and produced more vocalizations in response to playbacks of calls addressed to them compared to those addressed to other elephants.
"Elephants are using this arbitrary symbol to refer to another individual," explained Mickey Pardo, the lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University. "This tells us that they're probably capable of understanding the abstract connection between the sound that they're using and the individual that they have a relationship with."
While some dolphins and parakeets are known to address each other by imitating the call of the individual they are addressing, the study suggests that elephant names are not imitative. Instead, they could be as arbitrary as human names like "Emily" or "John."
"Elephants approached more quickly, vocalized sooner and produced more vocalizations in response to playbacks of calls addressed to them than to another receiver, which indicates that they can recognize and respond to their own 'name,'" the study authors write.
Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, a researcher at Harvard Medical School who has studied elephants in the wild for three decades, praised the findings, stating that they "speak to the elephant's ability to picture another elephant in their mind and address them without necessarily seeing them" and "suggest the broader possibility of language use in elephants."
The study's authors acknowledge that while they were unable to isolate individual elephant names or determine whether different elephants used the same name for a given individual, the practice of naming suggests advanced levels of thinking. Pardo further emphasized the importance of elephants' social bonds, stating that "the only way you can name other individuals is if you care enough about them and have enough of a need to interact with them that you bother to actually learn their names."
Researchers have long recognized profound, humanlike cognitive skills and empathy in elephants, which are known to grieve for their deceased community members and celebrate reunions with friends after periods of separation. The study's findings offer an opportunity to investigate the evolution of this rare ability in two divergent lineages – elephants and humans – whose last common ancestor lived 90 to 100 million years ago.
