Beware of scientists with an agenda.
Humans have been evolving and changing genetically for
millions of years. Most of that time is
hidden from us and we can only guess what life was like for the ancients who
would eventually become homo sapiens. What we know of human history for sure only
extends back a few thousand years. One
can assume that humans were hunter-gatherers over most of those blank millions
of years and deduce something from the record of hunter-gatherer societies that
existed before their histories were contaminated by modern society. Unfortunately, these societies exhibited a
variety of behaviors and invited considerable speculation. Not surprisingly, male anthropologists
focused on evidence of male domination and warlike behaviors. Female anthropologists, not surprisingly, managed
to find evidence to support theories where human evolution was dominated by the
development of social skills rather than delight in murdering one’s neighbor.
What we are told of the properties of other animals with
whom we share this earth is often biased because the studies are conducted by
humans who have inevitably begun with the assumption that humans are unique and
all other animals must therefore be inferior.
The result of this perspective is smugly satisfying, but it causes us to
miss the rich and complex lives that other animals around us are living, and to
denigrate their actions based on emotion or intelligent reasoning as being
merely instinctual. Carl Safina wishes
to disabuse us of such fantasies in his book Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. He uses detailed
studies of the lives of elephants, wolves, killer whales, and dolphins, coupled
with an amazing collection of anecdotal experiences to convince us that other
animals are more similar to us in complex sociality than we might wish to
believe.
The subject here will be the means animals use to communication
with each other that takes the place of the language used by humans. Those who study animals living freely in
their natural habitats discover that communication is complex, it is frequent, and
it has to be learned just as human children acquire meanings from their elders. Also, it is often group specific, analogous
to the way human groups differentiate themselves with ethnic languages.
“It seems a common human
assumption that each species has one set of calls—no dialects, no differing
languages analogous to those among humans.
An implicit assumption seems to be that their vocalizations are innate
and don’t have to be learned.
Individuals taken from the wild as infants—as with zoo apes and circus
elephants and killer whales—likely never learned important aspects of their own
native ways of communicating with sound, gesture, context, and nuance.”
“Many birds have regional
dialects. Killer whales also have call
vocabularies used by some groups and not shared by others. Differences like this are everywhere around us,
but our discoveries about them are ongoing.
We are still cataloguing such behaviors and describing calls. Translating their communication, though,
might turn out to be a difficult-to-reach itch.
For now, what elephants are saying and understanding is more
sophisticated than is our understanding of what elephants are saying.”
Let us begin with what we know about elephant
communication.
“Elephant song spans ten octaves,
from subsonic rumbles to trumpets, about 8 hertz to about 10,000 hertz. Studies with instruments that can shift very
low sounds up into the range of human hearing show that if elephants are
excited enough to be streaming from their temple glands, they’re also
vocalizing. It’s just that, often, their
rumbles, though loud, are too low-frequency for humans to hear.”
“Elephants’ low-frequency
rumbles create waves not only through the air but also across the ground. Elephants can hear rumbles inaudible to
humans over distances of several miles.
Their great sensitivity to low frequencies derives through ear
structure, bone conduction, and special nerve endings that make their toes,
feet, and trunk tip extremely sensitive to vibration. So part of elephant vocal communication is
sent through the ground and received through their feet.”
What emerges over and over again in animals studies is
that the animals develop the tools they need for survival just as humans
did. However, given their physical
characteristics, the environments in which they lived in while evolving, and
the threats they encountered, the tools will be quite different for different
species. So different, in fact, that a
casual observer may not even recognize that communication is taking place.
It seems that elephants required the ability to
communicate over long distances to enhance their survivability—and they are
better at it than most people think possible.
“Hauntingly, elephants
communicate over very long distances. No
one knows how they do it. Even though
the low frequency of their rumbles pitches much of the calling too low for
human hearing, those calls are loud (115 decibels, comparable to loud live rock
music at 120 decibels). Loud enough
that, in theory, animals six miles away can hear such calls. We know that special receptors, called Pacinian
corpuscles, in their feet help them pick up elephant rumbles traveling across
the ground. Have they another way of
calling that penetrates even further?”
Since so little is understood about animal capabilities,
Safina must resort to anecdotal accounts of events to make his points.
“In a privately owned wildlife
sanctuary in Zimbabwe lived some eighty well-known, very relaxed elephants who
hung around a tourist lodge’s artificial water holes. Officials ninety miles away in Hwange National
Park decided to reduce the park’s elephant densities by ‘culling’ hundreds of
elephants (using helicopters to herd elephants to waiting marksmen, who were
instructed to kill whole families). On
the day the distant slaughter started, the relaxed tourist-lodge elephants
abruptly vanished. Several days later,
they were found bunched together in the corner of the sanctuary farthest from Hwange. ‘Elephants are able to detect distress calls
over large distances and are fully aware when their fellows are being killed,’
Cynthia moss has said.”
Perhaps observers have underestimated the capability of
elephants to process signals sent through the ground.
Elephants live complex social lives that require suitably
nuanced means of communications. They
live in families dominated by the matriarch, but they also must interact with
other families. They must communicate
within the family and between families and make decisions as to who to trust to
find water or food. And they must
remember and recall these interactions for future reference.
“Even if elephants don’t have a
sophisticated syntax, they have a vocabulary.
They wield a communication kit with dozens and dozens of gestures and
sounds and combinations. Why don’t we
understand them better by now?”
Elephants, like humans and many other animals, just like
to have company to chat with.
Before we sample another anecdote about elephants, a
brief diversion to describe whale communication is necessary.
“The great ‘baleen whales’ can
produce, as do elephants, sounds too low-frequency for human hearing. But an elephant would be astonished to know
what a whale can do with sound. The big
whales make sounds as loud as a medium sized ship. You can’t hear it; their frequency is too
low. Yet whales very, very far apart can
hear one another. Whales such as
finbacks swimming hundreds of miles from one another can migrate ‘together,’
their calls letting them stay in touch during their travels.”
What whales do with their sounds is fascinating.
“In the 1970s, scientists
realized that humpback whales sing structured songs. Strangely, even if they are coming from
thousands of miles apart, males converging on mating grounds all sing the same
song. Humpback song is composed of about
ten different consecutive themes, each made of repeated phrases of about ten
different notes requiring about fifteen seconds to sing. The song lasts about ten minutes. Then the whale repeats it. For hours in the ocean, in their season of
courtship, the whales sing. Each ocean’s
song is different, and over months and years it changes in the same way for the
thousands of whales in each ocean, the song somehow a continual work in progress,
fully shared.”
“Sometimes the change is sudden
and radical. In the year 2000,
researchers announced that humpback’s song off Australia’s east coast was ‘replaced
rapidly and completely’ by the song Indian Ocean humpbacks off Australia’s west
coast had been singing. It seems a few ‘foreigners’
made the trek west to east, and their song became such an instant hit with the
easterners that everybody had to sing
it. The researchers wrote ‘Such a
revolutionary change is unprecedented in animal cultural vocal traditions.’ And once a phrase in the song disappears, it
has never again been heard, despite over twenty years of eavesdropping.”
The reader might be wondering what whale songs have to do
with elephants. Actually, very little,
but it was such a great story that it just had to be included. The important thing to remember is that both
species like to express themselves at low frequencies below the detection level
of humans as sound. We are now ready to
describe a haunting encounter that was also makes so great a story it
absolutely must be included.
Safina includes an observation made by Lyall Watson as he
stood on a cliff overlooking South Africa’s seacoast. He was watching a whale that had surfaced and
then submerged again when he felt what he described as a “reverberation in the
air.”
“The strange rhythm seemed to be
coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge…where
my heart stopped…”
“Standing there in the shade of
the tree was an elephant…staring out to sea!...I recognized her from a color
photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the
title ‘The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.’
This was the matriarch herself…”
“She was here because she no
longer had anyone left to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the
ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of
infrasound. The under-rumble of the surf
would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for an animal used to be
surrounded by low and comforting frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and
now this was the next best thing.”
“My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many
being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vision
of countless other old and lonely souls.
But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something
even more extraordinary took place…”
“The throbbing was back in the
air. I could feel it and I began to
understand why. The blue whale was on
the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the
largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was
convinced that they were communicating!
In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives,
understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of
the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely
great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore,
woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind.”
“I turned, blinking away the
tears, and left them to it. This was no
place for a mere man…”
Language experts bicker back and forth over whether or
not animals should be deemed to possess languages. From Wikipedia
we obtain these comments on the topic.
“Animal languages are forms of
non-human animal communication that show similarities to human language.
Animals communicate by using a variety of signs such as sounds or movements.
Such signing may be considered complex enough to be called a form of language
if the inventory of signs is large, the signs are relatively arbitrary, and the
animals seem to produce them with a degree of volition (as opposed to relatively
automatic conditioned behaviors or unconditioned instincts, usually including
facial expressions).”
“Many researchers argue that
animal communication lacks a key aspect of human language, that is, the
creation of new patterns of signs under varied circumstances. (In contrast, for
example, humans routinely produce entirely new combinations of words.)”
If one doubts the ability of animals to communicate at a
level worthy enough to be considered in possession of a language, consider the
behavior observed in dolphins. Rewards
and/or punishments have long been used to train animals to perform specific
tasks on demand. Safina tells the tale
of two dolphins who were trained by Karen Pryor in the 1960s to respond to a
signal to “do something new.” Think
about that for a moment. To get an
animal to understand the concept of “do something you haven’t done before” is
quite impressive. To get two animals to
then collaborate on deciding what that something new should be and then execute
it is something that humans would have trouble dealing with.
“When the Hawaiian bottlenose
dolphins Phoenix and Akeakamai got the signal to ‘do something new,’ they would
swim to the center of the pool and circle underwater for a few seconds, and
then do something entirely unexpected.
For instance, they might both shoot straight up through the surface in
perfect unison and spin clockwise while squirting water from their mouths. None of that performance was trained. ‘It looks to us absolutely mysterious.’
researcher Lou Herman related. ‘We don’t
know how they do it.’ It seems as if they confer using some form
of language to plan and execute a complex new stunt. If there’s another way of doing it, or what
that might be, or whether there’s some other way to communicate that humans can’t
quite imagine—dolphin telepathy?—no human knows. Whatever it is, for the dolphins it’s
apparently as routine and natural as human kids saying, ‘Hey, let’s do this…’”
The method of communication between dolphins that is
recognized by humans does not seem to be consistent with such complex behavior.
“From everything we understand
at present, it appears that dolphins’ whistles convey information that is
simple and repetitive, not complex, not specific, not highly patterned; not a
word based, large-vocabulary, syntax-equipped language. Yet few who love dolphins—myself
included—really want to accept that. The
calls just sound too complicated and varied.
And so, waiting, we listen, hoping to someday hear more.”
Could dolphins have developed a language that was too
complex for humans to comprehend? Or,
might they have developed a method of communication that humans have yet to
even detect?
Safina has a tale to tell about dolphins that brings us
ever closer to the twilight zone. It was
recorded by a researcher named Denise Herzog who had been spending time
studying a group of free-living dolphins in the Bahamas.
“At the beginning of one
research trip, as Herzog’s vessel approached the familiar dolphins she had been
studying, they ‘greeted us but they acted very unusual,’ not coming within
fifty feet of the boat. They refused
invitations to bow-ride, also odd. And
when the captain slipped into the water, one came briefly nearer and then
suddenly fled.”
“At that point, someone
discovered that one of the people aboard had just died during a nap in his
bunk. Spooky enough. But then as the boat turned to head back to
port, ‘the dolphins came to the side of our boat, not riding the bow as usual
but instead flanking us fifty feet away in an aquatic escort….they paralleled
us in an organized fashion.’ After the
crew had attended to the sad business at hand, when the boat returned to the
dolphin area, ‘the dolphins greeted us normally, rode the bow, and frolicked
like they normally did.’ After
twenty-five years with those dolphins, Herzog never again saw them behave the
way they did when the boat had a dead man aboard. Perhaps in a way we don’t understand, dolphin
sonar lets them scan inside a boat and somehow realize and communicate among
one another that a man in a bunk has a heart that is still. Perhaps they detected that a human had died
using another sensory system, one that we humans neither possess nor
suspect. And what does it mean for dolphins to become solemn in
response to a human death?”
Humans seem determined to maintain their assumed perch as
the best that evolution has provided.
Perhaps it would be wiser to recognize that other animals, such as
elephants, whales, wolves and dolphins, are more appropriately considered
brothers and sisters rather than subspecies.
We might yet have a lot to learn from our near kin.
The interested reader might find these articles
informative:
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