Bonobos, one of humanity’s closest relatives, appear to string together vocal calls in ways that mirror a key feature of the human language, a new study carried out in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has found. While bonobos (Pan paniscus) produce grunts, peeps, whistles and hoots, they also combine these calls to create new meanings, researchers found, suggesting they may share a trait once deemed uniquely human: a complex language structure called nontrivial compositionality. In human language, this would be akin to how we understand “broken heart” where “broken” means one thing and “heart” another, but when combined produce a third meaning that isn’t the literal joining of the two. By contrast, “sleeping cat” joins an object with an action and doesn’t produce a distinct third meaning. “Our results indicate that nontrivial compositionality is not limited to humans,” the study’s authors write. “Bonobos, our closest living relative, also engage in [it].” The researchers recorded 700 vocalizations from wild bonobos in Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, a community-managed protected area where the apes are accustomed to human presence. For each call, the team tracked its contextual details, including what the bonobos were doing when they produced the sounds and how others responded to them. Using this language map, the researchers attempted to infer each sound’s meaning. For example, the bonobos used a “peep” as a suggestion, a kind of “I would like to,” while a “yelp” was more of a demand, like “Let’s do that.” A single whistle seemed…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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