To most people, elephants sound the same. Unless, you’re very experienced, it would be hard to tell the difference between two elephants based solely on their voices. They, however, have no such problems with us.

This ability matters because, to an elephant, not all humans are equal. They have no quarrel with the agriculturalist Kamba. But they often come into conflict with the cattle-herding Maasai over access to water or land, and they sometimes leave these clashes with a flank full of spears.

Back in 2009, Lucy Bates and Richard Byrne from the University of St Andrews showed that elephants at Kenya’s Amboseli National Park can distinguish between the smell of Maasai and Kamba clothes. If they sniffed eau de Maasai,