Talking Elephant


Talking elephant is something that we usually leave to other elephants. They make a series of low rumbles whilst in a group. Their full range of vocal statements is quite broad, ranging from contented rumbles through squeals to trumpets. Clearly other elephants know what all this means, but we are left guessing.

Some humans are good linguists while many of us are what are best described as failures and resort to the goodwill of those speaking other languages to learn ours. I thought that this was a trait of many English speakers, but is apparently more widely spread.

 In the Everland Zoo in South Korea, Koshik, an Asian Elephant, is on his own own and can rumble or chirp with no response from his keepers who are his only friends. At twenty years old he has been feeling the need for the occasional chat and so has had to compromise and learn a few words of Korean.

In addition to learning the Korean words for Hello, No and Good, he can also tell his keepers to Sit Down or Lie Down. Stoeger et al have studied Koshik’s linguistic abilities by listening, of course, but also by recording the spectral pattern of what he says (1). They show a good match between Koshik’s utterances and a human saying the same thing.

The sound frequency lies clearly between the low frequency rumbles and the high frequency chirp. It isn’t the usual frequency for talking elephant; so it seem that we have a talking elephant who not only talks elephant, but who has learnt a few words of Korean.

It turns out that this is quite a feat for a talking elephant; as they don’t use that frequency range beloved of humans, so how does he do it? He sticks his trunk into his mouth to modify the sound coming from his vocal chords. Clearly this will limit his conversation, as it is difficult to carry out a long conversation with your mouth full of trunk.

It is probably as much of cry for help as anything else, though, as twenty or so years on your own with no one to talk to must be hard.

  1. Stoeger et al., Current Biol., (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.022

Walking Your Moai

Photo Bjarte Sorensen, Creative Commons

Walking your moai is not a task to be undertaken lightly. Weighing in at a 10,000 pounds and up, you will need to have a team to help. The good news is that they won’t dash off chasing rabbits like your dog. In the first place there are no rabbits on Easter Island and the moai are just standing around staring into the distance and don’t seem very interested in the world around them.

Easter Island has been famous for it’s moai (huge stone statues) for a couple of centuries, but the how and why has been topics of controversy. The sculptors quarried and carved then from one location and roads were built to take them to their allotted places. Some fell by the wayside, but about 900 made it.

The ongoing controversy is how they got from A to B. A being the quarry and B being their home turf. A popular view was that they were rolled the road along in a recumbent posture on logs and propped upright when they arrived. The problem is that the heaviest are ~ 160,000 pounds and there aren’t that many trees around, though there may have been once. But the big problem is the weight and how to lift that.

The more recently espoused idea is that they walked from their quarry where they were carved upright. Perhaps shuffled is the best description, aided by groups of well wishers holding onto ropes to pull and cajole them along.

A 10,000 pound concrete replica was built by Lipo et al and walked along a track using three strategically placed teams on ropes (1, 2). They made a good walking rate of 0.06 miles per hour. They conclude that that is the favorite methodology for their location and the design of the base lends itself to the shuffling motion.

However not everyone agrees that the demonstration proves the point, so the controversy rumbles on. But there is something attractive about imagining all those huge stone statues shuffling along from their quarry to to settle down to nice viewpoints along the road.


  1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440312004311
  2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/25/easter-island-statues-walked-into-position