Although we see the opposite very often, we think that our ability to communicate by speaking is the most important thing that distinguishes us from other living things. In fact, your understanding of the information given by attaching a meaning and sound to the shapes you see while reading these lines, that is, “writing” has developed as a result of this skill throughout history.
On the other hand, chimpanzees, the genetically closest living species to humans, have also developed some ways to communicate among themselves, just like other living things. Of course, genetic affinity between us leads to a startling and at the same time astonishing resemblance of these communication pathways. A study conducted in Tai National Park in Ivory Coast, a country known for its rainforests in Africa, revealed the vocal and verbal language used by chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees are making sentences! But how?
5000 different sound recordings of 900 hours in total, taken from a group of 46 different chimpanzees living in the national park, were analyzed. It was determined how chimpanzees use monophonic calls in sequences, how these sounds are arranged in sequences, and how independent sound sequences are combined.
12 different types of calls such as grunting, humming, screaming, whining, yelling, which were discovered to have different meanings depending on the place and context used by chimpanzees, were revealed. Binary sounds combined with single sounds were categorized as “bigram” and triple sounds as “trigram”.
A network map of how these expressions were combined in different ways was then made. How different types of bigrams and trigrams are ordered or recombined are revealed. It has been understood that the trigram, that is, the bigram, that is, between the triple sound sequence, is combined in different ways.
Tatiana Bortolato of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who was part of the research team, said: “It shows that chimpanzees have developed a much more complex voice communication system than previously thought.” For example, it was determined that single grunts were mainly related to food, while gasping grunts were used as a greeting sound. If chimpanzees detect a threat, they emit a single hum, but in their bilateral communication these hums are fainter.
Discovered 390 different sound sequences can shed light on the evolution of human languages:
At the end of the process we just mentioned; They arrived at 390 different sound sequences, that is, sentence structures, in which 12 different sound sequences are combined with different combinations and have different meanings. However, the number of these sound sequences may be higher than detected. Because 12 different sounds have the potential to be encoded in hundreds of different ways. That is, chimpanzees may use these sounds in new ways in the future to incorporate what they cannot express into their verbal communication.
The researchers concluded, “We see a structure that goes beyond the accepted understanding of primates, although it may seem much less than the infinite number of different sequences to be produced by humans. “By examining the vocal sequences of chimpanzees, which are a socially complex species like humans, we are trying to bring a new perspective to understanding where we came from and how our unique language evolved.”
You can access the published scientific article in Nature Communications Biology.
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