Wild elephants can distinguish between human languages, and they can tell whether a voice comes from a man, woman or boy, a new study says.
That is what researchers found when they played recordings of people for elephants in Kenya. Scientists say this is an advanced thinking skill that other animals have not shown. It lets elephants figure out who is a threat and who is not.
The result shows that while humans are studying elephants, the clever animals are also studying people and drawing on their famed powers of memory, study author Karen McComb said.
Photo: EPA
“Basically they have developed this very rich knowledge of the humans that they share their habitat with,” said McComb, a professor of animal behavior and cognition at the University of Sussex in England.
“Memory is key. They must build up that knowledge somehow,” she said.
The study was released on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
McComb and colleagues went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans, sometimes coming in conflict over scarce water.
The scientists used voice recordings of Masai men, who on occasion kill elephants in confrontations over grazing for cattle, and Kamba men, who are less of a threat to the elephants. The recordings contained the same phrase in two different languages: “Look over there. A group of elephants is coming.”
By about a two-to-one margin, the elephants reacted defensively — retreating and gathering in a bunch — more to the Masai recording because it was associated with the more threatening humans, study co-author Graeme Shannon of Colorado State University said.
“They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human language skills,” 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 Masai men and women. Since women almost never spear elephants, the animals reacted less to the women’s voices. The same thing happened when they substituted young boys’ voices.
“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.
While it shows quite a bit about elephant intelligence and adaptability, it also indicates a problem, said biologist Josh Plotnik, founder of Think Elephants International, a research and advocacy group.
“This is both fascinating in that it supports evidence we already have that these animals are behaviorally quite flexible, but also sad because it suggests that the conflict between humans and elephants is growing,” Plotnik, who was not part of the study, wrote in an e-mail.
In another experiment McComb and Shannon altered female and male voices, making female voices sound male by lowering their tone and resonance, and males sound female by raising their pitches.
Those kinds of changes fool most humans, but the clever elephants were not tricked, McComb said. They still moved away from the altered male voices and not the altered female voices, she said.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
UNCERTAIN TOLLS: Images on social media showed small protests that escalated, with reports of police shooting live rounds as polling stations were targeted Tanzania yesterday was on lockdown with a communications blackout, a day after elections turned into violent chaos with unconfirmed reports of many dead. Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan had sought to solidify her position and silence criticism within her party in the virtually uncontested polls, with the main challengers either jailed or disqualified. In the run-up, rights groups condemned a “wave of terror” in the east African nation, which has seen a string of high-profile abductions that ramped up in the final days. A heavy security presence on Wednesday failed to deter hundreds protesting in economic hub Dar es Salaam and elsewhere, some
Flooding in Vietnam has killed at least 10 people this week as the water level of a major river near tourist landmarks reached a 60-year high, authorities said yesterday. Vietnam’s coastal provinces, home to UNESCO world heritage site Hoi An ancient town, have been pummeled by heavy rain since the weekend, with a record of up to 1.7m falling over 24 hours. At least 10 people have been killed, while eight others are missing, the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said. More than 128,000 houses in five central provinces have been inundated, with water 3m deep in some areas. People waded through
RSS