Experts from the University of St Andrews believe the animals may even use their trunks as a means of communication, in a similar way to pointing.
The ability may have evolved from the complex social system elephants inhabit, which involves recognising unspoken signals.
"What elephants share with humans is that they live in an elaborate and complex network in which support, empathy, and help for others are critical for survival," said Professor Richard Byrne.
"It may be only in such a society that the ability to follow pointing has adaptive value, or more generally, elephant society may have selected for an ability to understand when others are trying to communicate with them, and they are thus able to work out what pointing is about when they see it."
Prof Byrne and colleague Anna Smet studied African elephants used to give tourists rides near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. The animals were trained to follow vocal commands, but were not accustomed to pointing.
To their surprise, the researchers found that the elephants spontaneously got the gist of human pointing and could use it as a cue to find food.
Even many great apes do not possess the human ability to understand the point of a pointed hand.
The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, shed light on the way elephants have been associated with humans for thousands of years .
They seem to possess a natural ability to interact with humans despite not being domesticated in the same way as horses, dogs and camels.
Prof Byrne added: "Elephants are cognitively much more like us than has been realised, making them able to understand our characteristic way of indicating things in the environment by pointing. "This means that pointing is not a uniquely human part of the language system."
Elephants are known to make regular prominent trunk gestures. It remains to be seen whether they act as "points" in elephant society, but the researchers do not rule the possibility out.
