U.K. scientists have confirmed that elephants are capable of understanding human gestures.
During a series of tests, expert Ann Smet of the University of St. Andrews, provided elephants with a choice between two identical buckets, then gestured towards the one containing a treat.
In the first test, the elephants chose the correct bucket, according to BBC News. The results were then published in the journal Current Biology.
The scientists worked with captive elephants at a lodge in Zimbabwe.
Professor Richard Byrne, the study's co-author, said the elephants had been rescued from culling operations.
"They specifically train the elephants to respond to vocal cues. They don't use any gestures at all," said Prof Byrne, according to BBC News. "The idea is that the handler can walk behind the elephant and just tell it what to do with words."
The news makes the elephants the first non-human animals to scientifically understand the gesture without being trained to do so.
Bryne said in separate studies that chimpanzees were not able to choose the correct bucket.
"Of course we had hoped that the elephants would be able to learn to follow human pointing, or we wouldn't have done the experiment in the first place," Smet said. "But it was really surprising that they didn't seem to have to learn anything. It seems that understanding pointing is an ability elephants just possess naturally and they are cognitively much more like us than has been realized."
Researchers have said that their findings might be able to explain how elephants have successfully been tamed in the past and have a "historically had a close bond with humans, in spite of being potentially dangerous and unmanageable due to their great size".
Studying the animals has helped experts build a map of part of the evolutionary tree that is "very distant from humans" according to BBC News.
"They're so unrelated to us," Byrne said. "So if we find human-like abilities in an animal like an elephant, that hasn't shared a common ancestor with people for more than 100 million years, we can be pretty sure that it's evolved completely separately, by what's called convergent evolution."
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