Elephants understand pointing and use their trunks to gesture, research finds "What elephants share with humans is that they live in an elaborate and complex network in which support, empathy, and help for others are critical for survival," said Professor Richard Byrne. It may be only in such a society that the ability to follow pointing has adaptive value, or more generally, elephant society may have selected for an ability to understand when others are trying to communicate with them, and they are thus able to work out what pointing is about when they see it. To their surprise, the researchers found that the elephants spontaneously got the gist of human pointing and could use it as a cue to find food. Even many great apes do not possess the human ability to understand the point of a pointed hand. The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, shed light on the way elephants have been associated with humans for thousands of years . They seem to possess a natural ability to interact with humans despite not being domesticated in the same way as horses, dogs and camels. Prof Byrne added: "Elephants are cognitively much more like us than has been realised, making them able to understand our characteristic way of indicating things in the environment by pointing. This means that pointing is not a uniquely human part of the language system. Elephants are known to make regular prominent trunk gestures. It remains to be seen whether they act as "points" in elephant society, but the researchers do not rule the possibility out.