You come across names in all human cultures and in different languages. Names form a large part of our identity and help us communicate with each other, but personal names are considered something uniquely human.
But new research suggests that wild African elephants may address each other with special calls (like a name) that have fascinating implications for the evolution of language. The new research, published as a preprint and not yet peer-reviewed, analyzed calls from wild elephants in Kenya’s large Samburu ecosystem in the north and Amboseli National Park in the south.
The data set collected included 625 separate calls, 597 of which occurred between members of the same family group. There were 114 unique voices and 119 unique receivers. The researchers included only calls to a single file where the recipient could be identified.
The team measured the acoustic properties of elephant calls and performed a series of statistical tests on the data to see whether it was possible to predict the identity of the call’s recipient. And this was indeed found to be the case, the team wrote: “Recipients of calls could be identified from the call structure statistically significantly more accurately than chance.”
One aspect that the team was particularly interested in was whether the calls mimicked the receiver’s own voices. This has been observed in other species, such as dolphins, which can learn each other’s individual vocal tags and respond to their own tags when they hear them. But what was fascinating about the elephant data was that the authors found limited evidence that callers imitated each recipient’s own call: “To our knowledge, this study provides the first evidence of vocal addressing to conspecifics in nonhuman animals without imitating the recipient’s calls.”
The authors also took 17 of the elephants and played them recordings of the calls originally sent to them to see how they responded: “Further supporting the existence of vocal tags, subjects approached the speaker more quickly and responded vocally more quickly than in control calls.”
Overall, the authors concluded that this phenomenon may be the first evidence that a nonhuman species uses a human-like naming system to refer to other individuals. There are some clues we can glean from their social makeup as to why this occurs especially in elephants.
Referring to the tendency of elephants to divide themselves into smaller groups and then band together, sometimes forming groups of hundreds of individuals, the authors describe the situation as “due to fission-fusion social dynamics, elephants are often out of sight of their closely bonded social partners and use contact hums to communicate over long distances.” “They produce vocal tags that can improve coordination ability when they are out of each other’s line of sight.”
As a prepress work, it’s important to note that this research has not yet been peer-reviewed. But the authors note that “the findings raise interesting questions about the complexity of elephant social cognition,” thus opening a fascinating new avenue for researchers to explore.
Preprint research is featured on bioRxiv.
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