In bonobos calls, scientists hear language clues

After listening to hundreds of hours of APE calls, a team of scientists said he detected a characteristic of human language: the ability to set up sound strings to create new meanings.

The provocative conclusion, published Thursday in the journal Science, aroused praise of certain researchers and the skepticism of others.

Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, said that the study had contributed to placing the roots of language even further in time, millions of years before the emergence of our species. “The differences between humans and other primates, including in communication, are much less distinct and well defined than what we have supposed for a long time,” said Dr Amici.

But other researchers said that the study, which had been conducted on Bonobos, close relatives of Chimpanzees, did not have much to reveal how we use words. “The current results do not tell us anything about language evolution,” said Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Many species can communicate with sounds. But when an animal makes a sound, it generally means only one thing. The monkeys, for example, can make a warning call in reference to a leopard and a different for an incoming eagle.

On the other hand, we, humans, can chain words so as to combine their individual meanings in something new. Suppose I say: “I am a bad dancer.” When I combine the words “bad” and “dancer”, I no longer mean them independently; I am not saying, “I am a bad person who can also dance.” Instead, I mean I don’t dance well.