Most everyone has heard the notion of a memory like an elephant’s. Now you maybe be able to add smarts to that, thanks to a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. The idea to take away from this story is that elephants definitely get the point.

The finger point that is. Richard Byrne, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, studied the behavior of 11 African elephants at a wildlife research and rehabilitation center in Zimbabwe. In this specific study, an experimenter would stand between two buckets—one with a treat and one without a treat—and point at the bucket with the treats. The researchers found that that the elephants would investigate inside a container 68 percent of the time if a human points to it. A 1-year-old human will look at the indicated container about 78 percent of the time.

What makes this study unique is that unlike most other experiments where the animals are first trained to expect a treat for guessing correctly, based on Pavlov’s theory, these elephants were not. “Our results show that elephants spontaneously attend to and correctly interpret human … gestures without extensive prior learning opportunities — the only nonhuman species so far to show this ability,” wrote Byrne and his graduate student coauthor, Anna Smet.

Elephants now enter the realm of domesticated animals such as cats and dogs that have shown to pick up on human cues like pointing. This trait has been a topic of debate as to why it happens. Some have argued that the trait has evolved over time from close interactions with humans, and others believe it may be an innate ability of group-living animals.

The latter view is supported by the theory that animals in herds or groups would need to be able to pick up on cues from others in their group in order to effectively hunt or evade predators. The results from this study seem to support this theory.

“We suggest that the most plausible account of our elephant’s ability to interpret even subtle human pointing gestures as communicative is that human pointing … taps into elephants’ natural communication system,” the authors wrote.

That said, other social animals have been shown not to have this same ability (we’ll ignore the human joke here). “Surprisingly, Asian elephants have been found not to respond to human-given gestural cues,” authors wrote.