Author Topic: Elephants instinctively understand human gesture ....  (Read 625 times)

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Online Pandora

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Elephants instinctively understand human gesture ....
« on: October 11, 2013, 02:11:17 PM »
The article itself says "gestureS", but the only one discussed is pointing.

... they "get" the point ....

Quote
... In a series of tests, researcher Ann Smet, of the University of St Andrews, offered the animals a choice between two identical buckets, then pointed at the one containing a hidden treat.

From the first trial, the elephants chose the correct bucket.

... This makes them the only non-human animals to understand the gesture without being trained to do so.

In previous studies, Prof Byrne said, our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees, proved to be "hopeless" at at similar task.

... "It seems that understanding pointing is an ability elephants just possess naturally and they are cognitively much more like us than has been realised."

... Prof Byrne said studying elephants helped build a map of part of the evolutionary tree that is very distant from humans.

"They're so unrelated to us," he told BBC News. "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."


As I have always found elephants very interesting, I like this new "discovery".  Another piece documents that elephants know how to cooperate with one another, when they need a partner to accomplish something.

That's the good I found here.

Now for the bad.  The strike-out of "non-human" and the bolding is mine; humans are not animals, we've never been animals, we're not descended from animals and the theory of evolution on this issue is bullsh*t; "convergent evolution" my ass.

I find the desperate effort to connect our origins to animals/chimps/apes ironically amusing because it's so very contradictory:  on one hand it sort of confirms for the people-haters that we are no better than animals, if having descended from them; on the other, it shoots all to hell their insistence that we don't belong here and we're nothing more than a plague on Mother Earth.
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