African elephants have names for each other that are spoken through rumbles, scientists have found, in a 'really exciting' discovery. It's the first time an animal has been discovered creating individual names for each other, instead of just mimicking the other's noises like parrots and dolphins do.
Analysing only the audio data, the computer model predicted which elephant was being addressed 28% of the time, likely due to the inclusion of its name. When fed meaningless data, the model only accurately labelled 8% of calls. 'Just like humans, elephants use names, but probably don't use names in the majority of utterances, so we wouldn't expect 100%,' study author and Cornell University biologist Mickey Pardo told Sky's US partner network NBC News.