Elephants can determine ethnicity, gender, and age from acoustic cues in human voices
Abstract
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.
- Publication:
-
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
- Pub Date:
- April 2014
- DOI:
- 10.1073/pnas.1321543111
- Bibcode:
- 2014PNAS..111.5433M