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2 - Cognitive Abilities in Elephants

from Part I - The Comparative Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Lucy Bates
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
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Summary

Everybody knows elephants are intelligent – everybody, that is, except for evolutionary psychologists. The popular characterization of these large, long-lived, very social mammals is that they have fantastic memories and are considered somehow “special,” but the scientific evidence behind this reputation is somewhat lacking, with there having been relatively few attempts to study elephant cognition during the twentieth century. Fewer than 20 manuscripts detailing novel studies of elephant cognitive abilities had been published by the end of the first decade of this millennium (Byrne, Bates, & Moss, 2009), though a gradually increasing research effort is now resulting in progress.

So why, as psychologists, are we even interested in elephants, animals with which we have not shared a common ancestor for around 105 million years (Hedges, 2001; Murphy et al., 2001)?

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 14 - 22
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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