It's an article of faith in creationist cults that humans are a special creation, materially different to other animals and the evidence for this is that we have unique characteristics, ignoring for the moment that every species has unique characteristics, which is what makes them distinct species. And the list of 'uniquely human' characteristics which by creationist circular logic is 'evidence' of human uniqueness, includes language, culture, intelligence, the ability to make and use tools, a sense of self-identity, compassion, empathy, and love and affection.
The problem is, the items on this list keep on being found to not be unique to humans after all, but to be characteristic of lots of other species.
What characteristics once believed to be uniquely human have been found to exist in other species? Numerous characteristics once thought to be uniquely human have been discovered in other species. These characteristics span various domains, including cognition, emotion, communication, social behavior, and tool use. Here are some notable examples:Several animals and birds and even cephalopods and bumble bees have been seen using tools to solve problems, showing a high degree of intelligence; many other species have cultures; many animals, when tested the right way and not with tests designed to show how human they are, are found to have a sense of self-identity and sentience is taken for granted in just about all mammals and birds; they are certainly aware of their environment and their place in it.These discoveries have challenged the traditional view of human exceptionalism and highlighted the complexity and richness of animal behaviors and cognition.
- Tool Use and Manufacture:
- Chimpanzees: Use sticks to fish for termites and leaves as sponges to soak up water.
- Crows: Create hooks from twigs to extract insects from bark.
- Dolphins: Use marine sponges to protect their snouts while foraging on the seafloor.
- Complex Communication:
- Prairie Dogs: Have distinct alarm calls for different predators, indicating a form of language.
- Dolphins: Use a sophisticated system of clicks and whistles, and they can even recognize their own reflections.
- Honeybees: Perform complex dances to convey information about the location of food sources.
- Problem Solving and Planning:
- Octopuses: Demonstrate problem-solving skills by opening jars to access food.
- Birds (such as ravens): Show planning abilities by hiding food and remembering the locations later.
- Culture and Social Learning:
- Whales and Dolphins: Exhibit cultural traits, such as specific hunting techniques passed down through generations.
- Chimpanzees: Pass on knowledge of medicinal plants and tool use through social learning.
- Empathy and Altruism:
- Elephants: Show empathy by consoling distressed members of their group and helping injured individuals.
- Rats: Demonstrate altruism by freeing trapped cage mates, even when there is no direct benefit to themselves.
- Self-Awareness:
- Great Apes (such as chimpanzees and orangutans): Recognize themselves in mirrors, suggesting self-awareness.
- Dolphins: Also pass the mirror test, indicating self-recognition.
- Grief and Mourning:
- Elephants: Exhibit behaviors that suggest mourning, such as staying with deceased herd members and covering them with leaves and branches.
- Chimpanzees: Display signs of grief when a group member dies, such as carrying the body or staying close to it.
- Play and Creativity:
- Dolphins: Engage in play activities like riding waves and creating bubble rings for entertainment.
- Crows: Use objects to play games, demonstrating creativity and a sense of fun.
- Moral Judgments and Fairness:
- Capuchin Monkeys: Show a sense of fairness by rejecting unequal rewards for the same task.
- Dogs: Display behaviors indicating an understanding of fair play in social interactions.
And now we have evidence that wild African elephants have names for one another, showing the beginnings of language and requiring intelligence, memory, empathy and a sense of self. African Elephants have also been shown to grieve and travel considerable distances to mourn over the body of a dead matriarch, often from a neighbouring group, in what looks like a ritual, and they will often fondle the bones of a dead relative as though trying to communicate with them.
The fact that they have names for one another was discovered by researchers from Colorado State University (CSU) using machine learning to analyse the sounds they make as they interact. The researchers have just published their findings in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, accompanied by a CSU press release:
Colorado State University scientists have called elephants by their names, and the elephants called back.
Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among nonhuman animals, according to a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Researchers from CSU, Save the Elephants and ElephantVoices used machine learning to confirm that elephant calls contained a name-like component identifying the intended recipient, a behavior they suspected based on observation. When the researchers played recorded calls, elephants responded affirmatively to calls that were addressed to them by calling back or approaching the speaker. Calls meant for other elephants received less of a reaction.
Dolphins and parrots call one another by ‘name’ by imitating the signature call of the addressee. By contrast, our data suggest that elephants do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another, which is more similar to the way in which human names work.
Dr. Michael A. Pardo, lead author
Colorado State University, CO, USA.
And Save the Elephants, Kenya.
The ability to learn to produce new sounds is uncommon among animals but necessary for identifying individuals by name. Arbitrary communication – where a sound represents an idea but does not imitate it – greatly expands communication capability and is considered a next-level cognitive skill.
If all we could do was make noises that sounded like what we were talking about, it would vastly limit our ability to communicate.
Professor George Wittemyer, co-author
Warner College of Natural Resources
Colorado State University, CO, USA.
Chairman of the scientific board of Save the Elephants.
Wittemyer said that the use of arbitrary vocal labels indicates that elephants may be capable of abstract thought.
What’s in a name?
Elephant and human evolution diverged tens of millions of years ago, but both species are socially complex and highly communicative. Elephants function within family units, social groups and a larger clan structure, similar to the complex social networks humans maintain.
Similar needs likely drove the development of arbitrary vocal labeling – the naming of other individuals with abstract sounds – in both species, the researchers proposed.
Elephants are talkative, communicating with one another vocally in addition to sight, scent and touch. Their calls convey a lot of information, including the caller’s identity, age, sex, emotional state and behavioral context.It’s probably a case where we have similar pressures, largely from complex social interactions. That’s one of the exciting things about this study, it gives us some insight into possible drivers of why we evolved these abilities.
Professor George Wittemyer.
Vocalizations – from trumpeting to low rumbling of their vocal cords – span a broad frequency spectrum, including infrasonic sounds below the audible range of the human ear. Elephants can coordinate group movements over long distances using these calls.
Kurt Fristrup, a research scientist in CSU’s Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering, developed a novel signal processing technique to detect subtle differences in call structure, and Fristrup and Pardo trained a machine-learning model to correctly identify which elephant a call was addressed to based only on its acoustic features.
Our finding that elephants are not simply mimicking the sound associated with the individual they are calling was the most intriguing. The capacity to utilize arbitrary sonic labels for other individuals suggests that other kinds of labels or descriptors may exist in elephant calls.
Kurt Fristrup, co-author
Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering
Colorado State University, CO, USA.
Eavesdropping on elephants
As several families cross the Ewaso Ngiro River, a female elephant responds to her calf’s distress call. Elephants use a wide range of vocalizations to coordinate group movements.Credit: George Wittemyer.
Elephants are expressive animals, Wittemyer said, and their reactions are easy to read to those familiar with them. When the researchers played back samples, the elephants responded “energetically” and positively to recordings of their friends and family members calling to them but did not react enthusiastically or move toward calls directed to others, demonstrating that they recognized their names.
How did the elephants react when they discovered they’d been prank called?
The study also found that elephants, like people, don’t always address each other by name in conversation. Calling an individual by name was more common over long distances or when adults were talking to calves.They were probably temporarily confused by the playback but eventually just dismissed it as a strange event and went on with their lives.
Dr. Michael A. Pardo.
Research spanned four years and included 14 months of intensive fieldwork in Kenya, following elephants in a vehicle and recording their vocalizations. About 470 distinct calls were captured from 101 unique callers corresponding to 117 unique receivers in Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park.
Could we someday talk with elephants?
Researchers recorded elephant vocalizations in Kenya and used machine learning to confirm that some calls contain vocal labels akin to names.Credit: George Wittemyer
The scientists said much more data is needed to isolate the names within the calls and determine whether elephants name other things they interact with, like food, water and places.
"Unfortunately, we can’t have them speak into microphones,” Wittemyer said, noting the barriers to collecting sufficient data.
New insights into elephant cognition and communication revealed by the study strengthen the case for their conservation, the researchers said. Elephants are classified as endangered, due to poaching for their ivory tusks and habitat loss from development. Because of their size, they need a lot of space and can be destructive to property and hazardous to people.
While conversing with pachyderms remains a distant dream, Wittemyer said that being able to communicate with them could be a gamechanger for their protection.
It’s tough to live with elephants, when you’re trying to share a landscape and they’re eating crops. I’d like to be able to warn them, ‘Do not come here. You’re going to be killed if you come here.’
Professor George Wittemyer.
AbstractLike all the long list of other human characteristics that were once believe to be uniquely human and were waved around by creationists as evidence of human exceptionalism and special creation by their invisible magic god, turns out be almost the exact opposite - something humans share with at least one other sentient mammal and evidence of convergent evolution if not common ancestry.
Personal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogues exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual. Labelling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the referent radically expands the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogues were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call’s acoustic structure, regardless of how similar the call was to the receiver’s vocalizations. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual. Our findings offer evidence for individual addressing of conspecifics in elephants. They further suggest that, unlike other non-human animals, elephants probably do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls to address one another.
Pardo, M.A., Fristrup, K., Lolchuragi, D.S. et al.
African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02420-w
Copyright: © 2024 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
And another sacred dogma of creationism evaporates under the spotlight of scientific scrutiny.
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