African elephants address each other with name-like calls – similar to humans

What’s in a name? People use unique names to address each other, but we are one of the few animal species known to do this, including bottlenose dolphins. Finding more animals with names and investigating how they use them could improve scientists’ understanding of other animals and ourselves.

As elephant researchers Having observed elephants in the wild for years, my colleagues and I know wild elephants as individuals and have invented names for them that help us remember who is who. The elephants in question live fully in the wild and, of course, are unaware of the epithets we apply to them.

But in a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, we found evidence that elephants have first names that they use to address each other. This research places elephants among the very small number of species are known to address each other in this way, and this has implications for scientists’ understanding of animal intelligence and the evolutionary origins of language.

Finding evidence of name-like calls

My colleagues and I have long suspected that elephants might be able to address each other with name-like calls, but no researchers have tested this idea. To explore this question, we followed elephants across the Kenyan savannah, recording their vocalizations and noting, where possible, who made each call and to whom the call was directed.

When most people think of elephant calls, they imagine loud trumpets. But in fact, most elephant calls are deep, vibrating sounds known as booms which are partially below the range of human hearing. We thought that if elephants have names, they’re likely to say them amid rumbles, so we focused on these calls in our analysis.

The elephant’s rumbles have a deep, sonorous sound. Michael Pardo236 KB (download)

We reasoned that if rumbles contain something like a name, we should be able to identify who the call is intended for, based on the properties of the call alone. To determine whether this was the case, we trained a machine learning model to identify the recipient of each call.

We fed the model a series of numbers describing the sonic properties of each call and told which elephant each call was addressed to. Based on this information, the model attempted to learn patterns in calls associated with the identity of the recipient. We then asked the model to predict the recipient for a separate sample of calls. We used a total of 437 calls from 99 individual callers to train the model.

Part of the reason we needed to use machine learning for this analysis is because noise conveys multiple messages at once, including the caller’s identity, age and gender, emotional state and behavioral context. Names are probably only a small component in these calls. A computer algorithm is often better than the human ear at detecting such complex and subtle patterns.

We didn’t expect elephants to use names in every call, but we had no way of knowing in advance which calls might contain a name. Therefore, we have included all rumors where we thought they might use names at least sometimes in this analysis.

The successful model identified the recipient for 27.5% of these calls – significantly better than what would have been achieved if guessed at random. This result indicated that some noises contained information that allowed the model to identify the intended recipient of the call.

But this result alone was not enough evidence to conclude that the rumors contained names. For example, the model may have picked up on the caller’s unique voice patterns and guessed who the recipient was based on who the caller tends to address most.

In our next analysis, we discovered that calls from the same caller to the same recipient were significantly more similar, on average, than calls from the same caller to different recipients. This meant that calls were actually specific to individual recipients, like a name.

Next, we wanted to determine whether elephants could understand and respond to their names. To find out, we played 17 elephants a recording of a call that was originally addressed to them and which we assumed contained their name. Then, on another day, we play them a recording of the same person talking to someone else.

Elephants vocalized and approached the source of the sound more readily when the call was originally directed at them. On average, they approached the speaker 128 seconds earlier, vocalized 87 seconds earlier and produced 2.3 times more vocalizations in response to a call addressed to them. This result told us that elephants can determine whether a call was meant for them just by hearing the call out of context.

Names without imitation

Elephants aren’t the only animals with name-like calls. Bottlenose dolphins It is some parrots address other individuals imitating the recipient’s signature, which is a unique “call sign” that dolphins and parrots often use to announce their own identity.

This system of appointment by imitation it’s a little different from the way names and other words normally work in human language. Although we occasionally name things by imitating the sounds they make, such as “cuckoo” and “zipper,” most of our words are arbitrary. They have no inherent acoustic connection to what they refer to.

Arbitrary words they are part of what allows us to talk about the most diverse topics, including objects and ideas that do not make any sound.

Interestingly, we found that elephant screams directed at a specific recipient were no more similar to the recipient’s screams than they were to the screams of other individuals. This discovery suggests that, like humans but unlike other animals, elephants can address each other without merely imitating the recipient’s calls.

What is the next

We’re still not sure where exactly the elephants’ names are located in a call or how to separate them from all the other information transmitted in a rumble.

Next, we want to figure out how to isolate the names of specific individuals. Achieving this will allow us to answer a number of other questions, such as whether different interlocutors use the same name to address the same recipient, how elephants acquire their names and even whether they ever speak of others in their absence. .

Name-like calls in elephants could potentially tell researchers something about how human language evolved.

Most mammals, including our closest primate relatives, produce only a fixed set of vocalizations that are essentially pre-programmed into their brains at birth. But language depends on the ability to learn new words.

Therefore, before our ancestors could develop a complete language, they needed to develop the ability to learn new vocalizations. Dolphins, parrots and elephants everyone developed this ability independently and everyone uses it to address each other by name.

Perhaps our ancestors originally developed the ability to learn new vocalizations to learn each other’s names, and later co-opted this ability to learn a wider range of words.

Our findings also highlight how incredibly complex elephants are. Using arbitrary sounds to name other individuals implies a capacity for abstract thinking, as it involves using the sound as a symbol to represent another elephant.

The fact that elephants need to give each other names highlights the importance of their many distinct social ties.

Learning about elephant minds and their similarities to our own can also increase humans’ appreciation for elephants at a time when conflict with humans is one of the biggest threats to the survival of wild elephants.

This article was republished from The conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization that brings you trusted facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Mickey Pardo, Colorado State University

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Mickey Pardo received funding from the US National Science Foundation.