Saturday, November 18, 2023

Elephants have names for each other, just like humans

Amazing stuff! What a pachyderm surprise!

"... recent research has made the astonishing discovery that these highly intelligent gentle giants call each other by name. These specific and unique vocalizations are, of course, not as articulate as human speech but rather distinct low rumbling sounds. Still, they’re names nonetheless.
These remarkable findings position elephants as the first non-human animals to use a form of address that doesn’t mimic the receiver’s call, a trait previously observed in dolphins and parrots. ...
Some of these rumbles were played back to 17 wild elephants. When they heard their name, they were more likely to move quickly toward the sound source and vocalize faster in response. These rumbles were remarkably consistent with the receiving elephant. ..."

From the abstract:
"Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogs exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the name’s owner . Labeling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by that object or individual is key to the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogs were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here, we show that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls without any evidence of imitating the receiver’s vocalizations. A random forest model correctly predicted receiver identity from call structure better than expected by chance, regardless of whether the calls were more or less similar to the receiver’s calls than typical for that caller. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual, indicating that they can determine from a call’s structure if it was addressed to them. Our findings offer the first evidence for a non-human species individually addressing conspecifics without imitating the receiver."

Elephants have names for each other, just like humans Elephants give each other unique names, groundbreaking study reveals




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