Elephants live in multilevel societies, in which small subgroups exist within the large coexisting group. Individuals separate and reunite on a regular basis. And when elephants meet, a complex greeting ritual is born that can involve grunting, roaring, trumpeting; ears that flap, spread, or become rigid; and touches of the horn or tail.
The elephant greeting involves a wide variety of signals. In previous studies it had been observed that elephants regularly participate in these rituals – both with vocalizations and physical actions – but it had not been possible to determine whether these signals were deliberate gestures that they used to communicate, nor how they were combined with each other.
Now, research published in Communications Biology has found that African elephants (Loxodonta Africana) use different combinations of these signals to greet each other. Not only that. In addition, they have the ability to modify their way of greeting depending on whether the other elephant is looking at them or not, which could give us clues about the origin of our own language.
“Elephants are a particularly interesting species in which to study similarities with our language. On the one hand, they are very distant from us and have very different bodies from ours (just think that for them their trunk is equivalent to the human hand!)”, introduces Vesta Eleuteri, one of the authors of the study, and adds: “But on the other hand, elephants, like us, have advanced intelligence and live in a complex society, where individuals have different types and levels of social relationships.”
During their research, Eleuteri and his colleagues observed the greetings of nine semi-captive African elephants in the Jafuta Reserve in Zimbabwe. They experienced a total of 89 greeting events and recorded 1,282 cases of signals; 1,014 were physical actions and 268 were vocalizations.
The first finding was that elephants greet each other using specific combinations of vocalizations and gestures, such as flapping their wings and opening their ears, along with other physical movements that might seem less elaborate, such as raising or wagging their tails. Likewise, it was concluded that the combination of roars and ear flapping is the most common form of greeting, although it was identified that this was used more frequently among females than among males.
In this aspect, the rich variety of signals identified stands out: acoustic, visual, tactical… and even chemical. The study found that the mouth, genitals and temporal glands of elephants produce chemical secretions that contain information related to individual identity, reproductive or emotional state, which other elephants can capture with their trunks. This suggests that smell could also play an important role in the greeting of these animals.
The other big discovery of the study was that the elephants varied the communication methods used, depending on whether the subject to whom they were greeting was looking at them or not. The researchers identified that these animals were more likely to use visual gestures (such as opening their ears) when they were observed; and that, when the other person was not observing them, they tended to opt for gestures that produced sound (such as slapping their ears on the neck) or tactile signals (such as touching the recipient with their trunk).
“The ability to produce signals intentionally directed at an audience based on their visual attention is important because it implies the ability to understand the visual perspective of another and is a fundamental aspect of human language,” explains Eleuteri for La Vanguardia, and continues : “And similarly, the ability to combine signals in different ways or orders is a necessary prerequisite for the syntax and grammar of our language.”
The researcher specifies that these two abilities (to address an audience and to combine vocalizations and gestures) have been found, mainly, in humans and non-human apes. And in fact, the modifications that were observed in the elephants’ greetings depending on the attention of the audience are very similar to those made by wild chimpanzees, which select silent-visual gestures more frequently when the other is looking at them and tactile gestures when No.
And while studying ape communication is an important way to understand when specific properties of human language have emerged in our evolutionary history, in Eleuteri’s words, this does not resolve the big question of why they emerged: Were they social or ecological factors? those who promoted the emergence of our amazing capacity for language?
The author explains that, consequently, finding the ability to address an audience, as well as the ability to combine vocalizations and gestures in specific ways in the communication of elephants and apes, “suggests that highly social species may have separately evolved similar abilities to be able to satisfy similar social needs.”
Regarding the function of these greetings between elephants, the study proposes that their objective is to promote recognition and strengthen social bonds. But since the function of these interactions varies across the animal kingdom (for example, chimpanzees may use greetings to demonstrate dominant status and capuchin monkeys may use greetings to promote cohesion), the authors leave the door open for future research to conclude this. .
They propose that future studies explore how social relationships affect the use of these signals in wild elephants, the meanings of each gesture and the effect that each combination has on the subject receiving the greeting, among others.