Two identical buckets were placed in front of each African elephant and a researcher would point to the bucket that contained a treat. The elephants were unable to see the contents of the buckets. The elephant, by means of indicating with its trunk, chose the bucket the researcher indicated and containing the treat 67.5% of the time. Human babies can do so 70% of the time.
This makes elephants the only non-human animals that can understand the meaning of gestures without any training. Elephants also have other human-like abilities like weeping for their dead and recognizing themselves in mirrors.
This research could help us understand why it is possible to train such huge, dangerous and generally unmanageable animals. If it can be proven that elephant trunk movements are also gestures and not just a means of sniffing the breeze, then we could be much closer to understanding how elephants communicate with each other in the wild.
One of the intriguing facts about elephants is that some of their vocalizations are infrasonic, and are therefore inaudible to humans.
