New Study Finds Elephants May Have Names for Each Other

It suggests a high level of thinking.

For years, scientists have observed elephants' high levels of intelligence when it comes to herd activity. A new potentially groundbreaking study shows just how smart they might actually be. 

The research, published in the Nature Ecology & Evolution journal, examined African elephants' responses to the sounds they make for each other and whether they mirror similar behaviors observed in dolphins and parakeets. In those species, however, the animals mimic each others' calls as a way of getting each other's attention.

"Clear evidence for arbitrary names in other species is lacking," the authors wrote in the study. "Bottlenose dolphins and orange-fronted parakeets address individual conspecifics by imitating the receiver’s 'signature' call, a sound that is most commonly produced by the receiver to broadcast their identity." 

"Non-imitative learned vocal labelling may be more cognitively demanding than imitative labelling, as it requires individuals to make an abstract connection between a sound and referent," they added. "Evidence that arbitrary vocal labelling is not unique to humans would expand the breadth of models for the evolution of language and cognition."

Related: African Elephants Were Dropping Dead, Now Scientists Know Why

To test their theory, the scientists analyzed 469 calls from wild African elephants in Kenya that had a known caller and receiver. They then identified which sounds appeared to be "names" and played them back over a speaker, prompting a response from the animals. The team found that the 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,'" they said. 

"We [found] that African savannah elephants address members of their family with individually specific, name-like calls," they stated. "These 'names' are probably not imitative of the receiver’s calls, which is similar to human naming but unlike known phenomena in other animals."

More research needs to be done to determine the validity of these sounds as individual names and just what the elephants are responding to when they hear them. Plus, the authors note that it could teach us a lot about our own cognitive abilities considering humans and elephants shared an ancestor approximately 90 to 100 million years ago. 

Elephants have been observed exhibiting humanlike behaviors in the past, including grieving when a member of their herd dies or celebrating when reuniting with loved ones after time spent apart. The saying doesn't go "an elephant never forgets" for a reason.