Human Speech Evolution: Orangutan Mimics Human Conversation
Human Speech Evolution: Orangutan Mimics Human Conversation
By Susmita Baral @sushbaral On 07/27/16 AT 5:28 PM
An ape at the Indianapolis Zoo is giving scientists insight into how human speech may have evolved across time. Scientists from Durham University in the United Kingdom discovered that orangutans might be able to control their voices after an eight-year-old orangutan named Rocky mimicked the pitch and tone made by researchers.
Rocky, now 11 years old, was studied from April to May in 2012 when researchers played a “do-as-I-do” game with the ape. Essentially, a researcher would make a random sound that varied in pitch and tone and Rocky would mimic the noise. The team then compared the more than sounds made by the ape with a database housing thousands of hours of clips of over 120 orangutans in the wild and captive.
By cross-referencing Rocky’s "mimic" vowel-like noises with the database, the researchers were able to verify that none of the "mimic" noises were found naturally within the orangutan population. Thus, the team was able to confirm that Rocky is capable of learning new sounds and controlling his voice instead of merely creating a "normal orangutan call with a personal twist."
"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," said Adriano Lameira, who was not on staff during the time of the research but joined the team in 2015, in a university release.
More:
http://www.ibtimes.com/human-speech-evolution-orangutan-mimics-human-conversation-2395391
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Watch: This orangutan is uprooting what we previously knew about language
By Rachel Premack
July 28
At first glance, this video of an orangutan imitating a trainer’s grunts may not seem incredibly significant. But primate researchers say Rocky, the 11-year-old orangutan in the video, could fundamentally alter how we think about spoken language.
“We don’t know exactly how human language emerged, but we do know that great apes have the cognitive ability to understand language,” said Robert Shumaker, executive vice president and zoo director at the Indianapolis Zoo. “We can no longer say that humans are the only species who can learn new vocalization and control (it) using the vocal folds or voice box.”
Published on Wednesday in Scientific Reports, a Nature publication, researchers from Britain, Germany and the United States provided evidence that orangutans are able to learn sounds from humans, then reproduce them at will. It had yet to be conclusively demonstrated that a great ape could control the pitch and volume of its vocalizations — until Wednesday.
Though it’s understood generally that apes can communicate, some believe spoken language is a uniquely Homo sapiens trait, said co-author Shumaker. Adriano Lameira of the University of Durham in Britain led the study, with independent researcher Madeleine Hardus, Alexander Mielke of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Serge Wich of Liverpool John Moores University.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2016/07/28/what-the-first-orangutan-to-speak-means-for-humans/
(Video at link.)
