African elephants (Loxodonta africana) display remarkable olfactory acuity in human scent matching to sample performance

•Habituated African elephants were trained to discriminate and match human odours using Matching to Sample (MTS) protocols.•African elephants displayed no loss of working memory, and successfully discriminated target odours.•African elephants also discriminated between related human individuals spanning three generations and including sibling pairs.•This experiment proved the elephants’ significant ability to perform well at operant conditioning tasks.