Elephants call each other by unique names, like humans

We were trying to figure out if elephants address one another with something akin to a name. The reason we thought that that might be the case is because, among other things, we know the elephants are one of the few mammals that are adept at vocal production learning, so they're able to learn to modify sounds based on what they hear. And not only that, they can also mimic sounds that are totally alien to their own species. We knew who made the call and who they were addressing, and we figured out who they were addressing based on behavioral cues. And I used a type of machine learning model called a random forest to see if we could predict who the calls were addressed to just based on the acoustic structure of the call, with the idea being that if the calls contain some information in them that identifies the intended target of the call, that's essentially a name or something functionally equivalent to a name. There are some intriguing parallels between elephants and humans that might suggest why our communication systems have evolved certain similarities, even though we're diverged by like 90 to 100 million years of evolution. We also have selection for certain genes that are associated with domestication. So that's been proposed recently as a hypothesis that elephants in addition to humans and bonobos are this sort of self-domesticated species. And I think that could be relevant to the evolution of complex communication in the sense that when you develop a more cooperative society, you need some means of facilitating that cooperation. Or maybe it goes the other direction. Maybe when you have this communicative means of facilitating cooperation, it allows cooperation to evolve. Not really sure which comes first, but it's totally speculative at this point. But that's just like all of these intriguing parallels between humans and elephants may be part of the reason why we have certain similarities in our communication.