Elephants Call Each Other by Name, AI Proves

African elephants address each other with individual sounds that function like names. Researchers had long suspected this, but only a machine learning model could confirm it.¹ The model learned from 437 calls by 99 elephants to predict the recipient based on acoustic features, and got it right in 27.5% of cases. With over a hundred possible recipients, random guessing would not have reached even one percent.²

Dolphins and parrots were already known to address each other with individual calls, but they imitate each other’s sounds. Elephants use distinct acoustic patterns instead. The researchers see this as evidence of abstract thinking.