Elephant brains: why Asians think bigger than Africans

When you think about an elephant, what comes to mind? A lumbering giant with flapping ears and a swinging trunk? Perhaps you imagine the majestic herds roaming the African savanna, or the temple elephants of India draped in finery. Elephants have fascinated humans for millennia, revered as sacred beings, exploited as workers, and admired as symbols of power.

But even though we’ve lived alongside these incredible creatures for thousands of years, we’ve only just begun to understand one of their most mysterious features: their brains.

A study published in PNAS Nexushas taken us a step closer. The research, led by Malav Shah and colleagues at Humboldt University of Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, reveals a surprising fact: Asian elephants, despite being smaller-bodied, actually have larger brains than African savanna elephants.

And that’s not the only discovery. Asian elephants also seem to devote proportionally less brain space to balance and movement (the cerebellum) compared to their African relatives. What does this mean for how these two species think, learn, and live their complex social lives? Let’s dive in.

Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) diverged from a common ancestor about 5–8 million years ago. Since then, they’ve gone down very different evolutionary paths. On the outside, the differences are easy to spot: African elephants are bigger, with huge ears and two fingers at the tip of their trunk for fine pinching. Asian elephants are smaller, with smaller ears and just one trunk finger, which they use to wrap around objects instead of pinching them.

Their relationships with humans have diverged, too. Asian elephants have been semi-domesticated for centuries, working in forestry, ceremonies, and warfare. African elephants, on the other hand, have resisted domestication, efforts by King Leopold of Belgium in the late 1800s to train African elephants as beasts of burden largely failed. But until recently, almost no one had asked: do these behavioral and cultural differences show up in their brains?

Elephant brains are hard to get hold of. They don’t come in neat, pickled jars like lab mice. A full-grown elephant brain weighs over five kilograms, is jelly-like in texture, and is encased in a thick skull that requires saws and axes to open. For much of history, researchers had only a handful of specimens from zoo animals to study. That made it nearly impossible to spot species-wide patterns.

This new research builds on decades of effort. The Berlin-based team, working with collaborators in South Africa and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, gathered 19 new elephant brains over thirty years. These came from both zoo animals that died naturally and from wild elephants culled due to conflict in Kruger National Park. The researchers also reanalyzed older collections, creating the largest comparative dataset on elephant brains to date.

Using high-resolution MRI scans, they mapped brain structures in detail, looking at the proportions of gray matter, white matter, and the cerebellum.

The results are very interesting: Asian female elephants had brains averaging about 5.3 kilograms, whereas African female elephants averaged about 4.4 kilograms. That’s nearly a full kilogram difference, even though African elephants are generally 10–15% larger in body mass.

African males, who are much larger than females, did have heavier brains than African females (about 5.6 kg on average), but the overall picture still challenges expectations. Asian elephants seem to pack more brain per body size. Scientists call this encephalization, how big the brain is compared to the body. By this measure, Asian elephants are more “brainy” than their African cousins.

Another revelation is elephant brains grow massively after birth, tripling in weight as the animal matures. At birth, an elephant’s brain is about 1.8 kilograms. For comparison, a newborn human brain is roughly 400 grams. But here’s the twist: relative to adult size, baby elephants are born with only about 35% of their final brain weight. Humans are born at about 20%, while most other primates are at 50–65%.

In other words, elephants and humans share a rare pattern of extended brain development after birth. This long “neural childhood” may be key to their intelligence. Just as human toddlers spend years learning language, culture, and social norms, young elephants rely heavily on experience and the wisdom of elders, especially the matriarchs who lead family groups.

If Asian elephants have the bigger overall brains, African elephants win in another category: the cerebellum. The cerebellum is the part of the brain that handles balance, coordination, and fine motor skills. In elephants, it’s especially important for controlling their trunks, those astonishingly versatile organs with up to 90,000 individual muscle fascicles.

African elephants have a proportionally larger cerebellum, making up about 22% of their brain, compared to 19% in Asians. That might connect to their two-fingered trunk tip, which allows for delicate pinching and a wider range of manipulations. Imagine the difference between using chopsticks (African elephant style) versus grabbing with a mittened hand (Asian elephant style).

The Berlin team suspects this trunk dexterity may have driven African elephants toward a bigger cerebellum. Asian elephants, by contrast, may have invested more in the cerebral cortex, the gray matter linked to learning, memory, and social complexity.

These brain differences may help explain real-world behavioral patterns, such as domestication potential. For instance, the larger cerebral cortex of Asian elephants could be tied to why they’ve been easier to tame and train throughout history. Their brains may allow more flexibility and learning. Also, they are important for social knowledge. Both species live in complex societies, but Asian elephants might rely even more heavily on experience-based learning. This could also relate to their longevity in captivity. In general, brain differences could explain trunk use and ecology. African elephants’ bigger cerebellum may reflect their unique feeding strategies and the need for high precision in handling vegetation across vast savanna ecosystems. More broadly, the study underscores how little we know about the inner lives of elephants. Despite being the largest land animals, their brains are still mostly a mystery.

Elephants are often described as having memories that never fade, emotional bonds that rival our own, and social structures as intricate as human families. These new findings add another layer: their brains are not only massive but also uniquely shaped by their evolutionary histories. Asian elephants, smaller in stature but larger in brain, may have an edge in flexibility and learning. African elephants, with their cerebellum-heavy brains, showcase the incredible fine control needed to master their trunk.

If you want to learn more, read the original article titled "Larger brains and relatively smaller cerebella in Asian elephants compared with African savanna elephants" on PNAS Nexus at http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf141.