A pointed lesson in elephant behaviour A new study has found elephants can pick up on human cues. Photo: Corbis African elephants get the point - the finger point, that is. At least that is the conclusion of a study published on Thursday in the journal Current Biology that examined the behaviour of 11 pachyderms who were pointed in the direction of hidden snacks. Study author Richard Byrne, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, said African elephants would investigate the contents of a container 68 per cent of the time if a human points to it. By comparison, a 12-month-old human will check out the indicated container 73 per cent of the time. The study authors experimented with a group of African elephants at a wildlife research and rehabilitation centre in Zimbabwe.A human would stand between two buckets and point to the one that had the treat. The elephants could not see into the buckets, and controls were conducted to ensure that the animals were not simply sniffing them out. "Our results showed that elephants spontaneously attend to and correctly interpret human ... gestures without extensive prior learning opportunities - the only non-human species so far to show this ability," Professor Byrne and his graduate student co-author, Anna Smet said. Though domesticated cats, goats, horses and dogs especially can pick up on human cues such as pointing, it remains a topic of great debate on just why this happens. While some say that these traits evolved because of close interaction with humans over the centuries, others suggest it may be an innate ability of group-living animals. The people who support the latter case say that the ability to pick up on the directions or cues of others would be helpful to animals that either hunt or try to avoid predators as a pack or herd. The Current Biology study appears to support that view. "We suggest that the most plausible account of our elephants' ability to interpret even subtle human pointing gestures as communicative is that human pointing .... taps into elephants' natural communication system," Professor Byrne concluded in the study. If so, then interpreting movements of other elephants as ... communication must be a natural part of social interaction in wild herds; specifically, we suggest that the functional equivalent of pointing might take the form of referential indication with the trunk. However, there are other social animals that appear not to get the point. "Surprisingly, Asian elephants have been found not to respond to human-given gestural cues," the authors said.