Study Finds Elephants Can Differentiate Between Human Languages
It is often said that an elephant never forgets particularly when it hears the approach of a potential predator. Scientists until now have not been aware about how finely tuned the hearing of an elephant is until researchers tried to find out whether pachyderms could tell the difference between different sets of humans.
It is well known that elephants possess great intelligence and can distinguish between different sexes, ages and even ethnicities in human voices.
To discover just how good the elephant listening ability is, researchers played back voice recordings of men, women and children from two sets of African ethnicities beginning with the cattle herding Maasai which regularly come into conflict with elephants and the Kamba who are farmers who rarely encounter the animals.
The two groups of people were recorded saying the same phrase “Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming”
The researchers then replayed the two different recordings for a family of African elephants that wander in and around Kenya’s Amboseli National Park.
The results of the study were recently published and showed that elephants tended to ignore the sounds made by women and children of the Maasai and also failed to show much reaction to the Kamba men.
However once they heard the voices of Maasai men who do most the hunting, elephants reacted immediately by displaying defensive behaviour. The elephants formed a huddle protecting their young calves and raised their trunks to smell the air for the presence of any perceived threats.
“The ability to distinguish between Maasai and Kamba men delivering the same phrase in their own language suggests that elephants can discriminate between different languages,” Graeme Shannon, co-author of the study said
This does not mean that elephants have the ability to understand human words however they can differentiate between different languages based on vocal cues such as inflections and the tongues vocal patterns.