Reacción a "African elephants address each other with name-like calls, study finds African elephants address each other with name-like calls, study finds"

I read the manuscript and must say that I found no evidence that African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls. However, the term “individually specific name-like calls” is self-contradictory. Names represent categories that apply to many individuals, they are not individually specific.  

It is also interesting that this statement in the title is not repeated in the same way in the abstract. In the abstract the authors wrote: “Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver.”  

And this is what the results really present. Some evidence that caller used a call variant similar to receiver call. That is imitation, less perfect like in dolphins and parrots, but there is no evidence of labels.  

In addition, the statement being better than random is not really a good quality statement. In such communication studies a good assignment is at least 4 to 10fold higher than random (e.g. a study on adult female coo calls showed an individual assignment of these calls approx. 50 times above chance, 67 subjects, 68.5% correct assignment, chance level = 1.49%).  

The characteristic of labels or names is their clear distinct nature, they have clearly distinguishable categories, like “a”, “b” or “c”, of in case of names, ”Joe”, “Mary”. The authors provide no evidence that such categories exist.   

The playback study also showed no huge differences in the response to test and control calls. Figure 4 (right) shows that only 3 of the 17 elephants vocalized more. How a significance of 0.009 can emerge from this is a mystery to me.