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Research Article

Elephants can determine ethnicity, gender, and age from acoustic cues in human voices

Karen McComb, Graeme Shannon, Katito N. Sayialel, and Cynthia Moss
PNAS first published March 10, 2014; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321543111
Karen McComb
aMammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, United Kingdom; and
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  • For correspondence: karenm@sussex.ac.uk G.Shannon@sussex.ac.uk
Graeme Shannon
aMammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, United Kingdom; and
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  • For correspondence: karenm@sussex.ac.uk G.Shannon@sussex.ac.uk
Katito N. Sayialel
bAmboseli Elephant Research Project, Amboseli Trust for Elephants, Langata 00509, Nairobi, Kenya
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Cynthia Moss
bAmboseli Elephant Research Project, Amboseli Trust for Elephants, Langata 00509, Nairobi, Kenya
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  1. Edited by Dale Purves, Duke University, Durham, NC, and approved February 3, 2014 (received for review November 20, 2013)

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Significance

Recognizing predators and judging the level of threat that they pose is a crucial skill for many wild animals. Human predators present a particularly interesting challenge, as different groups of humans can represent dramatically different levels of danger to animals living around them. We used playbacks of human voice stimuli to show that elephants can make subtle distinctions between language and voice characteristics to correctly identify the most threatening individuals on the basis of their ethnicity, gender, and age. Our study provides the first detailed assessment of human voice discrimination in a wild population of large-brained, long-lived mammals, and highlights the potential benefits of sophisticated mechanisms for distinguishing different subcategories within a single predator species.

Abstract

Animals can accrue direct fitness benefits by accurately classifying predatory threat according to the species of predator and the magnitude of risk associated with an encounter. Human predators present a particularly interesting cognitive challenge, as it is typically the case that different human subgroups pose radically different levels of danger to animals living around them. Although a number of prey species have proved able to discriminate between certain human categories on the basis of visual and olfactory cues, vocalizations potentially provide a much richer source of information. We now use controlled playback experiments to investigate whether family groups of free-ranging African elephants (Loxodonta africana) in Amboseli National Park, Kenya can use acoustic characteristics of speech to make functionally relevant distinctions between human subcategories differing not only in ethnicity but also in sex and age. Our results demonstrate that elephants can reliably discriminate between two different ethnic groups that differ in the level of threat they represent, significantly increasing their probability of defensive bunching and investigative smelling following playbacks of Maasai voices. Moreover, these responses were specific to the sex and age of Maasai presented, with the voices of Maasai women and boys, subcategories that would generally pose little threat, significantly less likely to produce these behavioral responses. Considering the long history and often pervasive predatory threat associated with humans across the globe, it is likely that abilities to precisely identify dangerous subcategories of humans on the basis of subtle voice characteristics could have been selected for in other cognitively advanced animal species.

  • animal cognition
  • communication
  • social behavior
  • predator recognition
  • vocalization

Footnotes

  • ↵1K.M. and G.S. contributed equally to this work.

  • ↵2To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: karenm{at}sussex.ac.uk or G.Shannon{at}sussex.ac.uk.
  • Author contributions: K.M. and G.S. designed research; K.M., G.S., and K.N.S. performed research; C.M. contributed essential data; C.M. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; K.M. and G.S. analyzed data; and K.M. and G.S. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1321543111/-/DCSupplemental.

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Elephants use voice cues to assess human threat
Karen McComb, Graeme Shannon, Katito N. Sayialel, Cynthia Moss
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Mar 2014, 201321543; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1321543111

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Elephants use voice cues to assess human threat
Karen McComb, Graeme Shannon, Katito N. Sayialel, Cynthia Moss
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Mar 2014, 201321543; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1321543111
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