We point to things without giving much thought to what a sophisticated act it really is. By simply extending a finger, we can let other people know we want to draw their attention to an object, and indicate which object it is.

As sophisticated as pointing may be, however, babies usually learn to do it by their first birthday. When scientists test other species, they find that pointing is a rare gift in the animal kingdom. Even our closest relatives, like chimpanzees, don't seem to get the point of pointing.

But Richard W. Byrne, a biologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and his graduate student Anna Smet now say they have discovered wild animals that also appear to understand pointing: elephants. The study, involving just 11 elephants, raises a provocative possibility that elephants have a deep social intelligence that rivals that of humans in some ways.

Researchers use a simple but powerful test to see if animals understand pointing. They put food in one of two identical containers and then silently point at the one with food in it. Then they wait to see which container the animal approaches.

While primates and most other animals that have been studied fail the test, a few have done well. Most of them are domesticated mammals, with dogs proving to be especially good at understanding pointing.

These results have prompted some researchers to speculate that during domestication, animals evolve to become keenly aware of humans. Others have made a different argument: they propose that the wild ancestors of species like dogs were already keenly aware of each other. In fact, that pre-existing capacity may have made those wild species easy to domesticate.

In the mid-2000s, Dr. Byrne began to wonder if elephants could pass the pointing test, too. He got the idea while he and a graduate student were conducting an experiment on wild elephants in Kenya. They found that elephants could distinguish the smells of people from hidden pieces of clothing. Sometimes, Dr. Byrne noticed, the elephants would curl up their trunks, aiming them at the source of the smell. "Maybe they were pointing," Dr. Byrne said. "But we don't know that. They could be just sniffing the breeze."

The logical way to start exploring this possibility would be to give elephants the pointing test. But these giant mammals are a lot more challenging to work with than a poodle. In fact, it wasn't until last year that Ms. Smet was able to run the test.

She traveled to Zimbabwe, where a company called Wild Horizons offers elephant-back safaris. While the elephants were waiting to take tourists on a trip, Ms. Smet would set up two buckets behind a screen.

An elephant handler would bring one of the animals a few meters away from her. The elephant watched Ms. Smet lower pieces of fruit behind the screen and put them into one of the buckets. But the elephant couldn't see which bucket she put the fruit in.

Ms. Smet then brought the buckets out from behind the screen and stood between them. She pointed at the one with the fruit inside, and the handler walked the elephant toward the buckets. Ms. Smet noted which bucket it stuck its trunk in first.

For two months, Ms. Smet tested 11 elephants. She found that the elephants picked the right bucket 67.5 percent of the time.

Ms. Smet and Dr. Byrne published their results in the journal Current Biology.

Dr. Byrne is curious to know whether any other highly social wild mammals can pass the pointing test. Whales and dolphins would be at the top of his list, but he isn't holding his breath for those experiments to be published. "They make elephants look easy to work with," he said.

The New York Times

(China Daily 10/27/2013 page11)