If you give an elephant an apple, she’s going to want some more. But how can she get through to the nearby humans who are keeping those luscious treats away from her?

After working with elephants in Zimbabwe, researchers reported that the animals are capable of making very deliberate gestures to communicate that desire for more. Their study was published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

In the study of the evolution of language and other forms of communication, researchers have long been interested in whether nonhuman animals use gestures. That’s because gestures can reveal to what extent individuals are aware of the attention and inner state of others. Identifying creatures that use movement to elicit behavior from others can help reveal how and when, in the family tree of life, complex communication evolved.

Many studies about gestures focus on primates. But elephants are another natural subject for this research because they live in groups and have elaborate social lives. Perhaps they, too, use movement to communicate.

To understand the research, think of how humans get others to do what they want. Vesta Eleuteri, a researcher at the University of Vienna and the study’s lead author, explained how she might signal to a friend non-verbally to pass her a bottle of water.

“I first check if you are looking at me,” she said. “If you are looking at me, I might point at the bottle.” After that signal, “I wait for you to react. If you don’t react, I persist. I might reach toward the bottle, I might wave toward the bottle. Once you give me the bottle, I stop gesturing.”