{"id":25284,"date":"2025-04-03T18:00:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T18:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25284"},"modified":"2025-04-03T18:24:45","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T18:24:45","slug":"in-the-calls-of-bonobos-scientists-hear-hints-of-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=25284","title":{"rendered":"In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hundreds of hours of recordings suggest that the apes can generate meaning by stringing sounds together in pairs. But some scholars are skeptical.<\/p>\n

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After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings.<\/p>\n

The provocative finding<\/a>, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others.<\/p>\n

Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, said that the study helped place the roots of language even further back in time, to millions of years before the emergence of our species. \u201cDifferences between humans and other primates, including in communication, are far less distinct and well-defined than we have long assumed,\u201d Dr. Amici said.<\/p>\n

But other researchers said that the study, which had been conducted on bonobos, close relatives of chimpanzees, had little to reveal about how we use words. \u201cThe present findings don\u2019t tell us anything about the evolution of language,\u201d said Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Many species can communicate with sounds. But when an animal makes a sound, it typically means just one thing. Monkeys<\/a>, for instance, can make one warning call in reference to a leopard and a different one for an incoming eagle flying.<\/p>\n

In contrast, we humans can string words together in ways that combine their individual meanings into something new. Suppose I say, \u201cI am a bad dancer.\u201d When I combine the words \u201cbad\u201d and \u201cdancer,\u201d I no longer mean them independently; I\u2019m not saying, \u201cI am a bad person who also happens to dance.\u201d Instead, I mean that I don\u2019t dance well.<\/p>\n

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Hundreds of hours of recordings suggest that the apes can generate meaning by stringing sounds together in pairs. But some scholars are skeptical.After listening to hundreds of hours of ape calls, a team of scientists say they have detected a hallmark of human language: the ability to put together strings of sounds to create new meanings.The provocative finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, drew praise from some scholars and skepticism from others.Federica Amici, a primatologist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, said that the study helped place the roots of language even further back in time, to millions of years before the emergence of our species. \u201cDifferences between humans and other primates, including in communication, are far less distinct and well-defined than we have long assumed,\u201d Dr. Amici said.But other researchers said that the study, which had been conducted on bonobos, close relatives of chimpanzees, had little to reveal about how we use words. \u201cThe present findings don\u2019t tell us anything about the evolution of language,\u201d said Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.Many species can communicate with sounds. But when an animal makes a sound, it typically means just one thing. Monkeys, for instance, can make one warning call in reference to a leopard and a different one for an incoming eagle flying.In contrast, we humans can string words together in ways that combine their individual meanings into something new. Suppose I say, \u201cI am a bad dancer.\u201d When I combine the words \u201cbad\u201d and \u201cdancer,\u201d I no longer mean them independently; I\u2019m not saying, \u201cI am a bad person who also happens to dance.\u201d Instead, I mean that I don\u2019t dance well.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25286,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25284"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25287,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25284\/revisions\/25287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}