Study
African elephants can use human pointing cues to find hidden food
Smet, Anna F.; Byrne, Richard W.
Current Biology, 2013
Elephants chose between two identical closed buckets, only one of which was baited. An experimenter pointed at the correct bucket. Controls tested whether the animals could smell the food, and variants removed body orientation and gaze cues so that only the pointing arm carried information.
- Studied in
- Loxodonta africana
- Sample size
- 11 working elephants tested individually
Elephants chose the indicated bucket well above chance on the first trial, without training, and continued to do so when only the arm gesture was available.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
African elephants spontaneously understand human pointing, an ability otherwise well demonstrated only in domestic dogs.
How NatureHQ reads it
The first-trial performance is the load-bearing detail: an animal that learns a cue over many trials tells you about learning, while one that reads it immediately tells you about what it already understands. Dogs are usually explained by domestication for cooperation with people; elephants were not bred for that, which makes the comparison genuinely awkward and genuinely interesting.
- Working elephants with extensive daily experience of human handlers and their gestures.
- Modest sample size.
- Does not establish that elephants use comparable gestures with each other.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Cell PressPublished in a Cell Press journal.
doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.037
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.