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Those behaviors could be better described as "looking" and "facing", couldn't they? Pointing means something pretty specific to humans, especially when we're ta

• TeMPOraL 4y ago
  I'd agree with GP here - pointing with a finger is a very specific variant, that's arguably cultural in nature. More fundamentally, pointing is about communicating to the other being they should focus their attention elsewhere, and where that elsewhere is. "Looking"/"facing" and associated body language is a more common form of doing this, and humans too do it and recognize it, even if no fingers are being moved.
• harrisontan 4y ago
  From an evolutionary/physiology standpoint, human bipedal locomotion freed up our forelimbs/arms such that "limb assisted pointing" became possible/practical. Perhaps why elephants seem to grasp human pointing is because their trunks serve as a similarly "free" limb that they can use to point at things. Sort of like convergent evolution, but behavioral rather than morphological... > "When they detect something alarming, they characteristically face towards it and raise their trunk above their head with the tip of the trunk pointed to [the danger]," Byrne said. "We've always thought they were sniffing the breeze, but maybe they're also pointing; our results suggest that's more than possible." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/131010-elephant-pointing-animals-behavior-africa-science https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/131010-el...