"They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human language skills," Shannon said. "They'

This handout photo provided by the University of Sussex, taken in April 2011, shows a wild elephant in Amboseli National Park in Kenya reacting to sound played by scientists in experiments that show they can distinguish between human languages and genders. Elephants are so clever they use their famed memory to be discriminating listeners of us humans. That way they can determine who is a threat and who isn t, according to study released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is an advanced thinking skill that no other non-human animal have demonstrated, scientists u2 world tour say.
WASHINGTON Dr. Seuss had it right: Horton really does hear a Who. Wild elephants can distinguish between human languages, and they can tell whether a voice comes from a man, woman or boy, a new study says.
That's what researchers found when they played recordings of people for elephants in Kenya. Scientists say this is an advanced thinking skill that other animals u2 world tour haven't shown. It lets elephants figure out who is a threat and who isn't.
"Basically they have developed this very rich knowledge of the humans that they share their habitat with," said McComb , a professor of animal behavior and cognition at the University u2 world tour of Sussex in England.
McComb and colleagues went to Amboseli National Park in Kenya, where hundreds of wild elephants live among humans, sometimes coming in conflict over scarce water. The scientists used voice recordings of Maasai men, who on occasion kill elephants in confrontations over grazing for cattle, and Kamba men, who are less of a threat to the elephants. u2 world tour The recordings contained the same phrase in two different u2 world tour languages: "Look over there. A group of elephants is coming."
By about a two-to-one margin, the elephants reacted defensively retreating and gathering in a bunch more to the Maasai language recording because it was associated with the more threatening human tribe, said study co-author Graeme Shannon of Colorado State University.
"They are making such a fine-level discrimination using human language skills," Shannon said. "They're able to acquire quite detailed knowledge. The only way of doing this is with an exceptionally large brain."
They repeated the experiment with recordings of Maasai men and women. Since women almost never spear elephants, the animals reacted less to the women's voices. The same thing happened when they substituted young boys' voices.
While it shows quite a bit about elephant intelligence and adaptability, it also indicates a problem, said biologist Josh Plotnik, founder of Think Elephants International, a research and advocacy group.
"This is both fascinating in that it supports evidence we already have that these animals are behaviorally quite flexible, but also sad because it suggests that the conflict between humans and elephants is growing," u2 world tour Plotnik, who was not part of the study, wrote in an email.
In yet another experiment McComb u2 world tour and Shannon altered female and male voices, making female voices sound male by lowering their tone and resonance, and males sound female by raising their pitches. Those kinds of changes fool most humans, but the clever elephants weren't tricked, McComb said. They still moved away from the altered male voices and not the altered female voices.