The elephants could be smarter then we previously thought, or at least that’s what a new study discovered.

In fact there were studies that demonstrated that apparently, elephants have a high sense of social ties and a high level of intelligence. For example, elephants cry, play, have incredible memories, and laugh.

This would indicate of course a high development of the animals’ cortex which “enables” such human-like manifestations. Now a new study conducted by the researchers from the University of St. Andrews revealed the elephants are remarkably perceptive when it comes to recognizing specific ethnic groups of people that vary in the degree of danger they are likely to pose.

In order to prove their thepry, the researchers had put up an interesting test. They first presented elephants with clean, red clothing and with red clothing that had been worn for five days by either a Maasai or a Kamba man. The Massai tribe is formed from hunters who are known to demonstrate their virility by spearing elephants, while the Kamba people are mainly farmers and agriculturalists.

The pachyderms reacted with great feat to Maasai-scented clothing and they tried to move away as fast as possible by running significantly faster in the first minute after they began to move. Also the researchers found the elephants traveled farther from the cloth smelling of the Maasai in the first five minutes, and took significantly longer to relax after they stopped running away.

Also the scientist investigated whether elephants can also use garment color as a cue to classify humans in the absence of scent differences by comparing their reactions to red versus white cloth. The elephants reacted with more aggression toward red than white, they found, noting that to elephants, red is actually a drab color.

"We think that this is the first time that it has been experimentally shown that any animal can categorize a single species of potential predator into subclasses based on such subtle cues," Lucy Bates, one of the authors of the study, said.

Bates speculated that the difference in the elephants “emotional reaction to odor versus color might relate to the amount of risk they sense in the two situations”, adding that elephants have a keen sense of smell. “With any scent present, fear and escape reactions seem to dominate anything else”, she said.

Another conclusion of the study was that while the elephants can be a threat in their encounters with humans, they tend to run away whenever a human presence is detected.