A team of scientists from Durham University in the UK may be one step closer to understanding how humans originally developed the ability to speak thanks to an orangutan named Rocky, who has demonstrated the ability to mimic a person’s vocalizations as part of a new study.
Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, anthropologist Dr. Adriano Lameira and his colleagues explained that they set out to investigate whether or not an orangutan would be able to learn new sounds and control its voice, and through a series of repetition-based experiments, they provided “the first evidence for real-time, dynamic and interactive vocal fold control in a great ape.”
As Popular Science explained, in order for actual spoken language to evolve, humans first had to master their vocal cords. However, since this ability has never been observed in any other kind of primate, some experts believed that it did not evolve until after we diverged from great apes.
However, Dr. Lameira’s team engaged Rocky in an imitation game at his home, the Indianapolis Zoo, and found that this might not be the case after all. The orangutan had to copy various noises produced by a person in order to earn snacks, and demonstrated the ability to alter both the pitch and tone of his vocalizations while also producing calls resembling vowels and consonants.
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Findings could alter our understanding of when speech evolved
The researchers then went on to compare Rocky’s vocalizations against a database containing at least 12,000 hours of observations from more than 120 wild and captive orangutans. They found that the sounds produced by Rocky were not a match to any known, normal orangutan calls.
The findings suggest that apes such as orangutans possess the ability to control their vocalizations and suggest that spoken language may not have developed after humans split from the great apes, the study authors explained in a statement. After all, their study revealed that Rocky was able to produce new sounds extemporaneously in a turn-taking context, Popular Science noted.
“Instead of learning new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by arousal over which they have no control, but our research proves that orangutans have the potential capacity to control the action of their voices,” Dr. Lameira pointed out. “This indicates that the voice control shown by humans could derive from an evolutionary ancestor with similar voice control capacities as those found in orangutans and in all great apes more generally.”
“It’s not clear how spoken language evolved from the communication systems of the ancestral great apes,” he added. “Our latest findings open up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans.”
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