Secrets of the Social World Inside the Animal Mind

I've spent most of my life out watching animals.

Ever since I was a child,

I've been fascinated by their lives and behaviour.

But in truth, it's never seemed quite enough.

I would give anything to be another animal for just five minutes -

to be able to experience the world the way they perceive it,

to know what they're thinking,

to be inside the animal mind.

And what I find most intriguing are the minds of the cleverest animals.

These most intelligent of animals all live in groups.

And it's made me wonder.

Could there be a direct relationship between needing to navigate

the hurly-burly of a complex social life and actually being clever?

In short, could being a social animal actually make you

a more intelligent animal?

I'm going to explore the minds of the most social animals.

And in particular,

the one that many people believe to be exceptional -

dolphins.

I'm going to be swimming with them

to find out what goes on in dolphin society.

-Get signal?

-Roger that.

Using cutting-edge technology to listen in on their conversations...

..and discovering their ability to recognise themselves.

Wow, look at that.

And that's not all.

Because, as we look into the minds of other social animals,

we'll also find out more about a species much closer to home -

we humans.

So, could it be that by delving into their minds,

we actually begin to learn something more about our own?

I've come here to the sub-tropical island of Bimini,

just 40 miles east of Florida,

and the reason I've come is that these crystal-clear shallow waters

are home to a highly social animal that's always fascinated me

but it's not an animal that I've ever met face-to-face

in the wild, not an animal that I've encountered in its world.

Kathleen Dudzinski

and Kel Sweeting are experts on the Atlantic spotted dolphin.

They've been studying the social lives of a group

of about 100 dolphins in the Bimini waters for over a decade

and they're optimistic

I might be able to see some really revealing behaviour.

The researchers identify individuals using their distinctive spot

patterns and they now know the age and sex of many of them.

Do you think that any of these animals that you've been

working with for some time now, how long have you been here?

This is my 11th research season.

OK, 11 seasons in the sea, do you think that they might

recognise you as much as you recognise them?

Am I wearing my science hat or my I'm-having-fun hat?

You can be subjective here.

I think that they do.

And I would hope that after this much time and earning their trust perhaps,

that they know it's me.

Dolphins are easy to romanticise and for that reason,

I've always been a bit sceptical about just how intelligent they are.

Is their social life really as intricate,

really as sophisticated as people claim?

Well, today, I might find out

because this is the first time that I've swum with wild dolphins.

Look at the conditions, the sun shining, the sea is blue,

and these stunning animals are just about ten metres behind me.

I'm itching to get in, itching.

OK, Al, we're ready when you are.

We're lucky and are quickly surrounded by a pod of 16 dolphins

from the Bimini group.

Kathleen is filming everything

so if we see any interesting social behaviour,

we can study it in more detail later.

And the dolphins swarm around, creating bubbles with their tails.

DOLPHINS WHISTLE

But then they do something strange.

They start to use their beaks to push each other through the water.

-That was awesome.

-That was amazing.

-Very cool.

-Very cool.

That has rocketed into the charts

as one of my greatest animal encounters.

Just to lay there on the surface,

albeit being buffeted by quite a bit of surf,

but looking down and seeing all of it, I can't wait to see it again,

it was too much to take in on the first occasion.

The behaviour we just saw is unusual -

Kathleen and Kel have only seen it a few times before.

So, firstly, which were the animals that were there?

What ages and did you know any individuals?

We definitely saw Split-jaw, Billy, Tim and Speedy

who are four males that often associate with each other.

Split-jaw is the oldest of the group,

Billy and Tim are similar in age, and Speedy's a little bit younger.

-So they're friends?

-It certainly looks like that way.

-Yeah.

When you look at their behaviour from different angles,

a surprising story of complex social relationships emerges.

What appeared to be a random ball of eight dolphins actually

contains the three friends...

Dolphins cement the strong bond between them

by touching each other's pectoral fins.

Billy and Tim's association - they're both 13 years old -

has lasted many years and they're core members of this Bimini group.

Dolphins are very complex social animals. They use a variety

of signals to share information, so they use sounds,

they use posture, they use behaviours,

they use interaction between individuals.

And their society is complex.

Here again is that strange pushing behaviour.

A juvenile male presents his belly to five others.

We know that one of these is the seven-year-old male "Number 95".

Together, they use their beaks to push the other dolphin

through the water.

Here Speedy's involved in the pushing too.

Why the dolphins do this is a mystery.

The scientists are sure that it's not sexual behaviour

and obviously the dolphins are not fighting.

Kathleen and Kel think it might be a form of play -

a sort of initiation rite

allowing juveniles to learn the rules of social life.

It certainly seems the case when you have a group of young individuals

that they're sort of testing the waters if you will,

trying to see who gets along with whom,

will this animal tolerate me being this close,

or are they just somebody I don't really want to be that close to,

and so they're sort of setting those relationships as youngsters.

It's been an absolute privilege

to observe these wild dolphins first-hand.

Their bustling social world is far more complex

than I could have ever imagined.

But the power of the dolphin mind is even more apparent

when they band together to hunt.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

In these shallow waters further down the coast of Florida,

individual dolphins find it hard to catch the fast-moving fish.

But watch what happens when they act as a group.

One dolphin swims in a circle.

It whips up a wall of muddy water that corrals any fish inside.

Three wait, anticipating what the other is doing.

The fish are driven right into their mouths.

Here, one comes around again to create another corral.

They've cleverly worked out an efficient way to catch fish.

This is extraordinary group behaviour

and it tells us much about the ingenuity of the dolphin mind.

You see, if they're co-operating,

it means the dolphins can communicate with each other -

they must possess some kind of language.

So, is the language of social animals

something that we could ever understand?

The Amboseli National Park in Kenya,

home to some of the most social animals on the planet -

elephants.

Not only are elephants extremely intelligent,

they're also highly vocal, using over a dozen different

types of call in their intricate social lives.

One Saturday afternoon, my parents took me to see

a film called Dr Doolittle.

It was about a man who actually spoke to the animals.

As a kid, it was my dream come true

and I'm not the only one that's obsessed about this.

There've been plenty of scientists studying animal communication that

have really wanted to unravel just how animals speak to each other,

in fact, to be able to converse with them too.

So, will it ever happen?

Karen McCoomb is professor of animal behaviour

from the University of Sussex.

The elephants here are the most studied anywhere in the world.

The thing about this park that's outstanding

is the visibility of the elephants,

a population of more than 1,000 elephants which we know individually.

Karen studies a specific part of elephant language -

their contact calls.

These allow elephants to keep in touch with one another

over long distances, even when they're out of sight.

We're going to use this gargantuan speaker which pumps out

sound at more than 100 decibels, which is clearly very loud,

to test these animals that are behind us.

Karen wants to find out if elephants can recognise each other

solely by the sound of their contact call.

RECORDING OF ELEPHANT RUMBLING PLAYS

She's made a library of these calls.

Some of the recordings are of elephants familiar to the group

but some are of strangers.

So, Karen, exactly which call are we going to play to these animals?

Here we're playing a call of a genuine stranger

so an individual that they won't have encountered.

-So, they've never heard this call before?

-No, not in this case.

And we're expecting them therefore to respond

-with a mixture of curiosity and alarm, I take it?

-Yep. For sure.

The reaction of the herd to the call can be very subtle...

..and Karen thinks our best chance is to observe the matriarch,

the female leader of the herd.

Right, you give me the shout and I'll hit the play button, then.

-It's all set up, isn't it?

-Yup.

So, go.

RECORDING OF ELEPHANT RUMBLING PLAYS

Listening.

What do you think?

Well, the matriarch is listening,

you can see she's holding her ears out a little bit from the head.

She turned around, didn't she?

She definitely stopped what she was doing and turned round

-so she heard it, there's no question about that.

-Yep.

Those on the left-hand side are walking away, aren't they?

There is a bit of defensiveness here,

there was bunching up within the group.

The reaction to a stranger's call is even stronger with this

larger herd that Karen's also filmed in Amboseli.

RECORDING OF ELEPHANT RUMBLING PLAYS

Again, they bunch up defensively, something they wouldn't do

if they'd heard a call made by an elephant that they knew well.

Karen has discovered that the matriarchs are the best ones

when it comes to identifying the calls of different elephants.

This allows them to quickly distinguish between friend and foe.

In order to pass these sorts of discrimination tasks that

we're giving them, they would need to be familiar with at least

100 other adult females in the population.

I imagine myself standing in a stadium

and there's 1,000 people in the stadium and scattered amongst them

are 100 people that I know and they all have to shout out "Chris!"

I wouldn't recognise the voices of 100 people in a stadium of 1,000.

No, I agree, it's not a trivial task

and the very fact that it's only the families with the older matriarchs

that consistently get it right points to it being a complex task

that you've got to build up a memory during your lifetime

in order to really be sure about getting it right.

Karen's work has confirmed that contact calls play a key role

in elephants' social lives.

And the discovery that elephants can recognise each other

and communicate in this way reveals the complexity of their mind.

You see, what the elephants are doing

is something far more sophisticated than what many species of animals

do when it comes to using their voice.

Birds respond when the sun comes up, it gets them singing,

sometimes they can recognise their immediate neighbours,

but not 100 other individuals, that is profoundly different.

However impressive elephant communication is,

scientists have long suspected

that dolphin language must be even more so.

And if only they listened closely enough, they'd be able to crack it.

Dolphin research really didn't begin in earnest until the 1960s

when one of the most extreme experiments took place.

I think it has to be a contender to be one of the most bizarre

ever in the history of animal behaviour.

Meet California neuroscientist John Lilly -

self-styled science guru of the 1960s.

He believed he could teach dolphins to speak English.

"And I just want to talk to such ancient characters

"and find out, you know, if they have any wisdom for us."

He thought the best way to do this was to have a person

share their life with a dolphin.

So, Lilly flooded the ground floor of this house

with 40cm of sea water for a male dolphin called Peter.

He then persuaded 22-year-old Margaret Howe to live with

the dolphin full-time for two and a half months.

Of course, no-one knew what was going to happen.

Margaret lived, ate and slept here.

This photograph shows her on the phone whilst Peter is listening in.

But much time was spent teaching Peter English.

In fact, two and a half hours a day.

This is a sound recording of Peter attempting to repeat numbers

spoken by Margaret.

RECORDING: One, two, three, four, five.

-PETER:

-Ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh, ahh.

One, two, three, four, five, six.

Ahh, ahh, ahh...

PETER WAILS

It was slow progress and keeping Peter focused was really tricky.

From early on in the experiment,

he started to make sexual advances towards his human companion.

Highly aroused, he would rub against her legs.

Margaret had to "calm him down"

before he could proceed with the lessons.

Controversial enough, but in another test,

Lilly injected dolphins with the hallucinogenic drug LSD

to see if it helped with their learning.

This was the 1960s, you remember?

It's safe to say that the dolphin-house-experiment,

to teach Peter to speak English,

was neither ethical nor a success.

The pioneering work that John Lilly did certainly helped inspire

both researchers and the public with a fascination for dolphins

and crucially, it taught those researchers that any ideas

of teaching dolphins human language was complete fantasy.

That's why today, scientists like Vincent Janik, here in Florida,

prefer to study dolphins in the wild.

He's researching the sounds that dolphins make to communicate.

And he's using a pioneering method of recording them.

We're going out today to try to find wild dolphins and attach tags to them

which are little recording tags that can give us information

about their sounds that they're making and also give us information

about their behaviour as they're in the bay, their own wild environment.

A dolphin's been captured in shallow water

and the team works rapidly to minimise any distress to the animal.

Until now, it's been almost impossible to gather useful

sound recordings of wild dolphins

for the simple reason that when they're in a group,

you can't tell which one is making which sound.

Vincent's neat solution is to attach a recording device -

it has suckers - to the animal's head.

Nicholas, Nicholas, get signal?

'Roger that.' OK.

It will now record all the sounds

and calls made by this individual dolphin

whilst also keeping a record of its movements.

In addition, the device transmits a signal so the team can track

the animal and recover the unique data at the end.

Five, four, three, two, one.

The dolphin's released.

This is all part of a bigger programme -

several dolphins are tagged.

At the same time, the scientists are constantly observing them

so later, they can match their behaviour

to the sounds they're making.

The device here measures the distance between the dolphins.

What's going on over there?

There's lots of splashing, I think that's a dorsal fin.

Yeah, they're two dolphins.

There's a variety of data that we're collecting here from the boat.

What we can look at is what the animal's doing,

whether it's travelling, whether it's foraging,

whether it's socialising with others,

those, those kinds of things we can observe from the surface.

They've now been tracking the dolphins for six hours.

The recorder then automatically detaches itself

from the animal captured earlier and the team retrieve it.

Back at base, the sounds can then be analysed.

RECORDING OF DOLPHIN WHISTLING PLAYS

At first listen, it's an absolute cacophony -

a whole range of dolphin clicks, whistles and pulses.

Half of these sounds are not relevant to the study,

they're used by dolphins to find their way around -

the echolocation clicks.

RECORDING OF DOLPHIN CLICKING PLAYS

But Vincent's interested in these other ones,

the communication calls,

and one of them in particular.

DOLPHIN WHISTLES THREE TIMES

There's one very fascinating sound which is the signature whistle

and the signature whistle is a call that, in a way,

labels the identity of an animal, it's, it's broadcasting who you are,

so here's an example of a signature whistle from just one animal.

DOLPHIN WHISTLES THREE TIMES

Every whistle is unique to each dolphin, just like a name.

And these are the only mammals apart from humans to have this

type of personalised call.

And yet the whistle is not fixed.

If male dolphins change their alliances,

they can alter their signature whistle.

The sounds that they do produce,

they can always bring in new modifications, new improvisations

if you want and so therefore, they're always able to somehow

change the sounds that they already have.

So the range of sounds they're making and the repertoire is

very, very large, and also very adaptable to new situations.

Vincent now believes we might be mistaken to think of this

as a human type of language at all.

We see language really as the human communication system,

and it's very specific to what we, what our needs are.

There's other very complex communication systems out there.

One other example is music.

We can use music to communicate about feelings for example,

and actually one can use music

to encode very specific messages as well.

MUSIC: "Jaws Theme" by John Williams

We all know what these sinister notes mean.

MUSIC CONTINUES

And we also know what this is telling us.

MUSIC: "Bridal Chorus" by Wagner

But critically, we don't need language to understand them.

And Vincent believes the calls of dolphins could be a completely

different type of communication,

as different from language as music is.

How dolphins communicate may be yet a third way of complex communication

that is again different from music and from language.

And it's very important in the study of this, to keep an open mind

and be broad because if we were to look for language, we would

actually already, in a way, blinker ourselves to other possibilities.

In truth, I reckon it might be many years, if ever,

before scientists can fully crack the dolphin code.

But what's clear is that dolphins have developed a unique ability

to communicate with each other.

So how did they get this ability?

To find out the answer,

I've come here to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC

to meet one of the world's leading experts on dolphin evolution.

Lori Marino came to this subject

through her research as a neuroscientist

measuring the brains of dolphins.

Modern dolphins have especially large brains

and she and her colleague wanted to discover how this came about.

Lori and Mark Uhen are the first scientists to study the fossil

skulls of ancient dolphin ancestors using CAT scanners.

So what have we got here then?

Well, this animal lived about 36 million years ago.

And we're going to stick it in the scan, what do we hope to find?

Well, the scanner will let us see inside the skull

and we'll be able to see all the spaces in here

and the one we're really interested in is the brain case back here,

so we'll be able to see how large the brain case was

and actually calculate the volume of the brain of this ancient animal.

And that's the part that changed over time in evolution

and it looks very different than what you'd see in a modern specimen.

This is a recreation of basilosauraus,

an ancestor of modern dolphins from 36 million years ago.

It was a solitary hunter.

Ferocious enough to take on sharks.

But it's the brain size of these massive predators

that Lori is interested in.

And the results from the scan are very surprising.

If we scroll though from the front towards the back,

we can see the size of the brain and the shape of the brain,

and we can see that, you know, the brain does get bigger

as we move towards the back but it's still a relatively

small cranial capacity for the size of the animal.

This animal had a very big body and a very small brain.

But when Lori studied the skulls of more recent ancestors,

she noticed something extraordinary.

Two million years later, drastic changes took place.

This is another dolphin ancestor, dori-don.

Taking into account its far smaller body size, the brain

of dori-don was almost twice as big as that of basilosaurus.

Around the same time, it's thought that these ancient sea mammals

stopped living alone and began instead to live in groups.

Relative brain size shot up, and along with that are signs

that their social ecology changed as well.

So they became social but when they did so, their brain size increased.

-Is that the theory?

-That's right.

Smaller dolphin ancestors like dori-don were forced to group

together for defence.

When you reduce your body size

and your dentition becomes less formidable,

you need to band together to protect yourself.

OK, so the development of social behaviour in this species was

-driving evolution.

-That's right.

The driver of the large relative brain size was social complexity.

And what a driver it was.

Remarkably, for over 30 million years,

until early humans came on the scene,

these dolphin ancestors had the most powerful brains on the planet.

Lori's work here at the Smithsonian strongly suggests that

there's a link between social living and having a larger brain.

It's a theory at least that needing to understand, to relate to

other individuals in that social group is actually driving

the evolution of a more powerful, more complex brain.

But is that an inevitable consequence of living in a group?

Well, there's a question...

Let's take a group of animals with one of the most extraordinary

social lives anywhere in the animal kingdom -

the termites.

They build these wonderful mounds here

to hold their complex societies.

And to discover just how complex, you have to peer inside.

What I'm hoping to find, of course, is some termites

and they occur in a number of different castes.

The most populous are the workers.

Look at that, there's a whole number of these animals here.

They're tiny, white animals about a millimetre or two long.

And then there are the soldiers.

Yeah, there's a soldier.

You can see their much larger heads and powerful jaws.

And in a nest like this, we'd expect there to be several queens.

And here's a figure for you - these queens can live for up to 45 years.

Most remarkable of all is what the society can build.

Take the architecture of the mound.

The workers create vents that draw in fresh air.

They build ducting so that warm air

and waste carbon dioxide can rise up and be pumped out at the top.

A very impressive air-conditioning system.

It's incredible what such small animals can design and construct

and especially surprising given

that each individual termite has a tiny brain.

They lack flexible thinking

and they have to carry out their tasks by rote.

But what they lack in brain power, they make up for in numbers

because inside this mound, there could be several million termites.

Each of those individuals goes about its simple duties

but when you add them all together, when you collectivise them,

we get what we call group intelligence

and, quite clearly, it works, it works very, very well.

But within a pod of dolphins, something else is going on.

You see, each dolphin is clever

and they have a sophisticated understanding

of what the other individuals in the group are doing.

What is it then about the dolphin mind that allows them to do this?

To try and answer this question,

I've come to the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Keeping dolphins in captivity is controversial,

and since 1988, aquariums in the United States don't take

any dolphins from the wild, except for the occasional stranding.

So, any new dolphins are captive-born.

The head trainer, Alison Ginsburg, is introducing me to Nonnie.

Each of the animals may know up to 65, 70 different hand gestures that

correlate to different behaviours that we would like them to perform.

-So you offer them the gesture and they produce the behaviour?

-Correct.

So take your fingers like this and you're just going to wiggle them.

DOLPHIN YELLS

Nice.

Now you're just going to take a fist and you're going to throw it out.

DOLPHIN CROAKS

We'll do one more.

-Take your hands like this and you're going to wave them at her.

-OK.

What about that?

-And she knows up to 70 gestures?

-Mm-hm.

-Amazing. Amazing.

-Absolutely.

Animal psychologist Diana Reiss believes it's

only in the controlled environment of aquariums that you can

unlock some of the secrets of the dolphin mind.

I often wonder when they see this, if they know the mirror is going up.

Here, she can carry out experiments

that simply wouldn't be possible in the wild.

This is the observation chamber here at the aquarium.

It's cramped but you can get some fantastic views of what's going on.

Now, he's going down to the bottom,

the other one turns around and comes right back.

-It's a beautiful bubble ring.

-Wow.

These dolphins have learnt to make their own bubble rings.

It's a clever-enough trick,

but Diana wants to investigate something far more fundamental.

Do dolphins recognise themselves as individuals?

It was long assumed that only the human mind was capable of this

but now we know a tiny handful of other animals can do it too.

Diana places a one-way mirror inside the observation window to

test the dolphins.

So now we're looking through a window and they'll be seeing the mirror.

They're not looking at us,

that's the key thing, they're looking at themselves.

They're looking at themselves.

(Wow! Look at that!)

-(Look at him twisting his body to look at himself.)

-(Yeah.)

(He's loving himself, that's one vain dolphin you've got there.)

Dolphins don't behave like this if they simply meet another dolphin.

This suggests that they understand that what they're seeing

isn't another animal, but a reflection of themselves.

One action never normally seen if they meet another is fin wiggling.

(You see that weird pectoral fin movement. Look at this.)

(This is not normal for a dolphin.)

(Now that is very weird.)

(That is amazing.)

Is it true that dolphins have been fascinated by watching themselves in

the mirror whilst they're copulating?

I've seen that and we've recorded that,

that was the first study that we did.

This remarkable footage of dolphins having sex was also filmed

through a one-way mirror.

They came to the mirror, and they looked head-on into the mirror

and would copulate while they both looked into the mirror and watched.

This is something they can't see without a mirror

so this is very sophisticated.

This is understanding it's you

and understanding this mirror is a tool to view yourself.

All this supports the idea

that dolphins must be aware that they're looking at themselves.

Dolphins share this ability to recognise themselves as individuals

with very few other animals.

Elephants can do it.

Chimpanzees can do it.

But the vast majority, including dogs and monkeys, simply can't.

And, interestingly, nor can young humans.

Before they're 18 months old, most children fail to point out

a red dot painted on their cheek.

This boy simply assumes that he's looking at another child.

Only when they're about two, do children first realise

that the mark is on their own cheek.

They now know the reflection is of themselves.

Diana has explored the age at which dolphins first pass the mirror test.

And what's truly remarkable is that, just like human toddlers,

dolphins don't learn to recognise themselves until they're two-years-old!

I've just had an extraordinary hour in a damp pit in a dolphinarium

and these moments are the real highlights of my life,

I can't tell you how excited I am at the moment.

I've just witnessed dolphin behaviour that I've not seen before

that was being interpreted by a scientist that had analysed it,

had quantified it and qualified it

and it's changed my life probably because I've seen these animals,

without doubt recognising themselves as individuals.

And I felt - maybe I'm getting old and soft...

..maybe I'm not as pragmatic as I used to be,

but I felt a connection with them based upon that self-awareness.

Social animals haven't evolved an ability to recognise themselves,

merely to preen in mirrors.

Understanding yourself as an individual

means you know others are individuals too.

To find out why this is so important,

I'm on my way to the Yerkes Primate Centre, near Atlanta.

When an animal like a chimpanzee

is aware that another in their group

might have a different perspective on the world,

it gives them an advantage.

It allows the chimp to lie and manipulate others.

Primatologist Frans de Waal coined the phrase "chimpanzee politics".

He and his team have set up an ingenious experiment to reveal

how a low-ranking animal can deceive a more dominant member of the group.

What we do here, is we hide food.

One individual knows where food is hidden,

the other one doesn't know where the food if hidden

and then we see how they manipulate the relationship

-in order to get the food.

-So how do you do that?

You show an animal food and hide it in the enclosure, I take it?

We show a low-ranking female where food is hidden,

then we release her together with the high-ranking female

who doesn't know anything and then the low-ranking one,

she can wait till the other one is gone, or distracted,

she can also mislead the other one and lead her in the wrong direction

in order to get to the food in time.

We are testing Missy and Rita.

Rita, the dominant chimp, comes out first.

If she knew where the banana was she would simply help herself.

But only Missy, the subordinate chimp,

saw the banana being hidden under the red tube.

Missy is also aware that Rita has no idea where the banana is.

In other words she realises

that Rita has a different perspective on the same situation.

Missy notices Rita close to the food

and so tries to appear nonchalant.

Rita now wanders off.

And when she's far enough away,

Missy goes for the banana.

She has successfully deceived Rita.

She's found her banana.

Frans has observed this behaviour in chimps,

but it's very rare in other animals.

That kind of deception is not so typical.

I think probably dolphins are capable of it,

and maybe elephants.

But you need a large brain, I think, to do this kind of thing.

Pre-meditated deception reveals much about the minds of animals.

They must be able to plan.

And they have to anticipate that their own actions

will influence events.

It's all high-level stuff.

And I've always been convinced that the most successful animals

are natural-born-liars.

And the best liars of all?

There's no contest I'm afraid, that's you and me, that's us humans.

And just think about it, be honest with yourselves,

think of all the lies that you tell to your social group

every single day to manipulate and control.

Well, not only to manipulate and control

but also to smooth over those relationships

to make sure that your social group is a functional one.

But social living is not just about lies and deceit.

Frans also wanted to test if animals had a sense of justice.

Would they realise if they were being treated fairly?

Normally you would think the only thing an animal should care about

is what do I get for my task - I work I get rewards -

but, no, they're comparing with what the other one is getting.

Frans began the fairness test with the capuchin monkey.

These small, clever animals are kept in large enclosures,

but, for the short duration of the test, they're brought into a lab.

Each monkey carries out a simple task.

And when both get a reward of cucumber, everyone's happy.

But watch what happens when the one on the right receives a grape instead.

Grapes are so much better than cucumber,

and the one who gets cucumber gets really emotionally upset

by the fact that the other one is getting grapes.

In chimpanzees things go actually a little bit further,

and gets very close to the human sense of fairness,

in that the one who gets grapes also gets upset sometimes

and the one who gets grapes sometimes waits till the other one

gets a grape, so it gets very close to the human sense of fairness.

So the one that's getting the better reward,

refuses to take the reward until the other animal is being similarly

-rewarded with the good stuff?

-Yeah. Yeah, that's in chimpanzees,

that has never been found in another animal,

but the chimpanzee goes much further in that

they care about reward division even if they're on the better end of the scale.

The ability to forge a friendship...

..to communicate with others in the group...

..to have a sense of fairness...

..to know yourself as an individual...

..and, occasionally, to deceive and lie.

These skills don't require strength

so much as a prodigious amount of brain power.

And the brainier you are, the more likely it is you'll succeed

within that group and pass your intelligence on to your own offspring.

This is why social living has driven the evolution of high intelligence.

But it's not just cleverness that differentiates social animals.

Animals with minds like this

often show behaviours which are very human.

They seem to be able to put themselves in the shoes of another individual.

And if they can do that, they are just a short step away

from demonstrating something that we call empathy -

and that's a trait that we always consider to be uniquely human.

This is now a serious scientific question

and researchers have been exploring whether there's any evidence of

social animals displaying behaviours which are akin to empathy.

It's what I want to witness back here at Amboseli.

The elephants here display a rare behaviour

that's nearly impossible to believe.

It's as moving as it is extraordinary.

But to capture it, Karen McComb and I are going to have to do something almost macabre.

We put the skull down in between the two jaw bones.

'We've created a miniature elephant graveyard

'in the path of an approaching herd.'

If you circle around...

'Now all we do is observe.'

That's good. OK, stop there a minute.

It looks like they might be interested, Karen.

Yeah, I think we've definitely got the beginnings of a reaction here.

The male is swinging his trunk towards the skulls and the jawbones.

Some of the younger females starting to respond as well.

They've picked up a whiff of the skulls.

Is this a skull of an animal that they know?

Coincidently there are bones...

there's a jawbone there of a female who they would definitely,

some of this family would definitely have come across in real life.

-They're going towards it now, look.

-Yeah, wow.

'A few animals, including chimpanzees,

'will be curious towards the corpse of a companion,

'touching and investigating the body.'

But only elephants take an interest in the skulls and bones

of their own kind, long after death.

Now we're really starting to get a reaction.

We've got the females clustering in around the skull

and the touching the jawbones, all the trunks are coming in at once.

Stretching in all at the same time, yeah.

You see the way the ends of the trunks are moist there?

That's enhancing the scent that they're getting.

It's a very intensely social thing this approaching the skulls.

They're not just going up as single individuals,

they're coming around as a group.

The matriarch's right there in the core of the group

and everyone is together, reaching in their trunks

and really feeling these skulls.

Just to qualify, you have tried this with inanimate objects

and other skulls, I mean in the sense that they're not responding

to any object that we put in their path,

-and they're not responding to our scent either.

-No, no way.

They are specifically giving these responses to elephant skulls and ivory.

They pick out the long dead remains of their own species

and show this intense interest.

You wouldn't see that in any other species, except for humans.

It would be amazing to know what was going on in their heads when they do that.

I mean we can only guess.

Penny for your thoughts, penny? I'd offer millions!

Reluctantly the young male turns away and goes off to follow the rest of the family.

Watching that group of elephants was a moving experience.

It's really difficult not to anthropomorphise here and see them as mourning

because they arrange themselves in such a reverential way,

in a way that we would around a dead relative.

I suppose we may never know exactly what's going on in their mind

but you can't help but speculate that they have a concept of death.

And if they have a concept of death does that mean that they

understand that that animal has died and gone?

Does that mean that they understand that one day they will die too?

Because that parallel would be, not only similar,

but exactly the same as ours.

If social animals can experience such a deep emotional connection

with one another, how far could these feelings extend?

Well, in early 2013 a remarkable incident was filmed off Hawaii

that may provide some answers.

A male dolphin had got fishing line and a hook caught on its body.

Without anything being done, he might well have died.

But the dolphin swims in to a group of divers.

Now, think about it -

this animal must know that he's in danger.

Might he also realise that the humans,

instead of harming him, could actually help him?

In other words, could this dolphin be taking a calculated risk

that these people will show pity for his plight?

It's a very difficult question to answer.

But the good news is that the dolphin survived -

perhaps an extraordinary example

of empathy crossing the species barrier.

Personally, I think I'd always underestimated the complexity of the dolphin mind.

We couldn't be more different than these animals.

We've evolved to live on land, they in the sea.

But the way that we both use our brains to deal with others,

there are clear similarities.

Maybe, mentally we're a lot closer to these animals than I initially thought.

Over the course of this series I've had many memorable experiences.

I've come close to feeling what it's really like to be a wolf.

I've witnessed the incredible problem-solving skills of the crow family.

Now, finally, exploring the world of the most social of animals has completed my journey.

And by looking into other animals' minds, I've changed my own.

And that has to be a good thing.

And it's made me happy.