Forest Elephants

I was watching a 60 minutes show a few days ago and they had a piece on a scientist named Andrea Turkalo who is studying forest elephants in the Congo Basin. They are doing research on mapping out the elephant language and say that it is very complex. I learned a few things about elephants that surprised me. They showed a little clip where a baby elephant had died and several elephants kept trying to revive the little guy. Eventually, faced with its death, the elephants formed a procession to pass by the dead elephant, gently touch it and then utter some noises. They will even bury the elephant under grasses and branches. Each elephant did this and the researchers were comparing it with a funeral procession. Piqued by this, I did a bit of research (wikipedia!) and apparently elephants are very high on the intelligence, self-awareness, altruism and emotional scale. They are comparable with primates. Which makes me wonder... how is that we continue to see ourselves, as humans, as somehow above and beyond the "animal kingdom". Over and over again we are faced with evidence that we are not the only self-aware beings in the world... and yet we continue to act as if we are the only ones that matter. Perhaps the elephants have something to teach us?