In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption In this brief clip of two of the trials, Professor Richard Byrne describes how the elephants got the point from the first test. 
  
 African elephants have demonstrated what appears to be an instinctive understanding of human gestures, according to UK scientists. 
  
 In a series of tests, researcher Ann Smet, of the University of St Andrews, offered the animals a choice between two identical buckets, then pointed at the one containing a hidden treat. 
  
 From the first trial, the elephants chose the correct bucket. 
  
 The results are published in the journal Current Biology. 
  
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Animal keeper Rachel Melling describes the bond she feels with the elephants she works with and how they "respond to body language". 
  
 The scientists worked with captive elephants at a lodge in Zimbabwe. 
  
 Prof Richard Byrne, a co-author on the research, said the elephants had been rescued from culling operations and trained for riding. 
  
 "They specifically train the elephants to respond to vocal cues. They don't use any gestures at all," said Prof Byrne. 
  
 "The idea is that the handler can walk behind the elephant and just tell it what to do with words." 
  
 It seems that understanding pointing is an ability elephants just possess naturally Ann Smet, University of St Andrews Mud bath: Why elephants enjoy a good wallow 
  
 Despite this, the animals seemed to grasp the meaning of pointing from the outset. This makes them the only non-human animals to understand the gesture without being trained to do so. 
  
 In previous studies, Prof Byrne said, our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees, proved to be "hopeless" at at similar task. 
  
 Ms Smet added that she had been impressed by the animals' apparently innate understanding of the gesture. 
  
 "Of course we had hoped that the elephants would be able to learn to follow human pointing, or we wouldn't have done the experiment in the first place," she said. 
  
 "But it was really surprising that they didn't seem to have to learn anything. 
  
 "It seems that understanding pointing is an ability elephants just possess naturally and they are cognitively much more like us than has been realised." 
  
 Nature's giants African elephants are the largest living land animals 
  
 Until recently there was one species of elephant in Africa - but they are now classified as either forest or bush (or savannah) elephants 
  
 Forest elephants, as the name suggests, are found in equatorial forests and have straighter trunks and rounded ears 
  
 Bush elephants are more widespread, mostly south of the Sahara in a range of habitats including savannah, swamps and deserts Source: BBC Nature Watch how elephants use mud as a sunblock 
  
 Prof Byrne said studying elephants helped build a map of part of the evolutionary tree that is very distant from humans. 
  
 "They're so unrelated to us," he told BBC News. "So if we find human-like abilities in an animal like an elephant, that hasn't shared a common ancestor with people for more than 100 million years , we can be pretty sure that it's evolved completely separately, by what's called convergent evolution." 
  
 The researchers said their findings might explain how elephants have successfully been tamed and have "historically had a close bond with humans, in spite of being potentially dangerous and unmanageable due to their great size". 
  
 But the scientists added the results could be a hint that the animals gesture to one another in the wild with their "highly controllable trunks". 
  
 Ms Smet told BBC News: "The next step [in our research] is to test whether when an elephant extends its trunk upwards and outwards - as they regularly do, such as when detecting a predator, this functions as a point." ||||| While primates and most other animals that have been studied fail the test, a few have done well. Most of them are domesticated mammals, with dogs proving to be especially good at understanding pointing. 
  
 Photo 
  
 These results have prompted some researchers to speculate that during domestication, animals evolve to become keenly aware of humans. Others have made a different argument: they propose that the wild ancestors of species like dogs were already keenly aware of each other. In fact, that pre-existing capacity may have made those wild species easy to domesticate. 
  
 In the mid-2000s, Dr. Byrne began to wonder if elephants could pass the pointing test, too. He got the idea while he and a graduate student were conducting an experiment on wild elephants in Kenya. They found that elephants could distinguish the smells of people from hidden pieces of clothing. Sometimes, Dr. Byrne noticed, the elephants would curl up their trunks, aiming them at the source of the smell. 
  
 “Maybe they were pointing,” Dr. Byrne said. “But we don’t know that. They could be just sniffing the breeze.” 
  
 The logical way to start exploring this possibility would be to give elephants the pointing test. But these giant mammals are a lot more challenging to work with than a poodle. In fact, it wasn’t until last year that one of Dr. Byrne’s students, Ms. Smet, was able to run the test. 
  
 Ms. Smet traveled to Zimbabwe, where a company called Wild Horizons offers elephant-back safaris. Each morning, while the elephants were waiting to take tourists on a trip, Ms. Smet would set up two buckets behind a screen. 
  
 An elephant handler would bring one of the animals a few yards away from her. The elephant watched Ms. Smet lower pieces of fruit behind the screen and put them into one of the buckets. But the elephant couldn’t see which bucket she put the fruit in. 
  
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 “I actually checked that from elephant height,” Ms. Smet said. 
  
 Ms. Smet then brought the buckets out from behind the screen and stood between them. She pointed at the one with the fruit inside, and the handler walked the elephant toward the buckets. Ms. Smet noted which bucket it stuck its trunk in first. 
  
 Video 
  
 For two months, Ms. Smet tested 11 elephants. When she crunched the data afterward, she found that the elephants picked the right bucket 67.5 percent of the time. (One-year-old human babies do a little better at these tests, scoring 72.7 percent.) 
  
 Ms. Smet found that the elephants could follow her pointing whether she stuck out her whole arm or just used her hand. And when she simply stood between the buckets, by contrast, the elephants stuck their trunks in the buckets at random. 
  
 Ms. Smet and Dr. Byrne published their results Thursday in the journal Current Biology. 
  
 The scientists were able to rule out the possibility that the elephants learned to associate pointing with food over the course of the experiments. “They were just as good on Trial 1,” said Dr. Byrne. 
  
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 Other researchers were intrigued but cautious about drawing conclusions from the study. Diana Reiss, an expert on elephant cognition at Hunter College, wondered if the elephants had already learned about pointing by observing their handlers pointing to each other. 
  
 “In these elephant camps such opportunities can easily go unnoticed by their human caretakers,” said Dr. Reiss. 
  
 Dr. Byrne and Ms. Smet plan to address this question and investigate whether wild elephants can point to each other. 
  
 “It makes us want to revisit visual signals by elephants for elephants,” said Ms. Smet. 
  
 Dr. Byrne is also curious to know whether any other highly social wild mammals can also pass the pointing test. Whales and dolphins would be at the top of his list, but he isn’t holding his breath for those experiments to be published. “They make elephants look easy to work with,” he said. ||||| The next time you need to show an elephant where something is, just point. Chances are he’ll understand what you mean. 
  
 New research shows elephants spontaneously understand the communicative intent of human pointing and can use it as a cue to find food. 
  
 Richard Byrne and Anna Smet of the University of St. Andrews tested 11 African elephants on what’s known as the object-choice task. In this task, a food reward is hidden in one of several containers and the experimenter signals which one by pointing to it. 
  
 People understand pointing, even as young children. But the track record of other animals on the object-choice task is mixed. Domesticated animals, such as dogs, cats, and horses, tend to perform better than wild ones. Even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, typically struggles to understand pointing when it’s used by human caretakers. 
  
 What’s so remarkable about the elephants’ success on the object-choice task is that they did it spontaneously. Byrne says that in studies of other species, the animals have had the opportunity to learn the task. This is usually during the experiment itself, which consists of a prolonged series of tests over which the animals come to realize they will get rewarded with food if they follow the line of the human’s pointing. 
  
 But the elephants performed as well on the first trial as on later tests and showed no signs of learning over the course of the experiments. The elephants Byrne and Smet tested are used to take tourists on elephant-back rides in southern Africa. They were trained to follow vocal commands only, never gestures. Smet recorded the behavior of the elephants’ handlers over several months and found they never pointed their arms for the elephants. What’s more, the elephants’ ability to understand human pointing did not vary with how long they had lived with people, nor with whether they were captive-born or wild-born. “If they have learned to follow pointing from their past experiences, it’s mystery when and how,” Byrne says. “Rather, it seems they do it naturally.” 
  
 In the experiment, Byrne and Smet varied several parameters that often affect children’s and animals’ performance on the task: whether the pointing arm was nearest the correct choice or not; whether the pointer’s arm crossed the body or was always on the side of what was pointed at; and whether the arm broke the silhouette from the elephant’s viewpoint or not. None of these made any difference. Even when the experimenter stood closer to the wrong location than the correct location, the elephants performed a little worse but still mostly responded to where her arm was pointing. 
  
 The only condition that truly stymied the elephants was when the experimenter simply looked at the correct location without pointing. Byrne says that elephant eyesight is poor compared to our own, and researchers who work with elephants have commented on how bad they are at identifying things by sight. “It would perhaps have been surprising if they had spontaneously responded to the rather subtle movements of a small primate’s head!” Byrne says. 
  
 Elephants are only distantly related to humans, which means that the ability to understand pointing likely evolved separately in both species, and not in a shared ancestor. But why would elephants attend to and understand pointing? One thing elephants do share with humans is that they live in a complex and extensive social network in which cooperation and communication with others play a critical role. Byrne and Smet speculate that pointing relates to something elephants do naturally in their society. “The most likely possibility is that they regularly interpret trunk gestures as pointing to places in space,” Byrne says. Elephants do make many prominent trunk gestures, and Byrne and Smet are currently trying to determine if those motions act as “points” in elephant society. 
  
 Reference: 
  
 Smet, Anna F. and Byrne, Richard W. (2013). African Elephants Can Use Human Pointing Cues to Find Hidden Food. Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.037 |||||
Researchers have found that when a human points, elephants understand her—without requiring any training. "It seems that understanding pointing is an ability elephants just possess naturally, and they are cognitively much more like us than has been realized," says a researcher. She tested their ability by putting a treat in one of two buckets. She pointed at the correct one, and the elephants—captive in Zimbabwe—understood right away, the BBC reports. In similar tests, other animals have gradually learned to understand pointing, but it didn't appear that elephants were learning anything as the experiments continued, Wired notes. When chimpanzees did a comparable test, they were "hopeless," the researcher says; the New York Times points out that dogs are generally good at understanding pointing. It's possible that elephants point with their trunks to communicate with each other in the wild; or maybe, as some experts have speculated, they've picked up on human pointing while living in captivity. In the future, the researchers would like to test dolphins and whales—but that's easier said than done. (In other fascinating elephant research, recorded tiger growls can actually help keep them safe.)