Researchers have found that wild orangutans vocalize with a layered complexity previously thought to be unique to human communication, suggesting a much older evolutionary origin.
Researchers have found that wild orangutans vocalize with a layered complexity previously thought to be unique to human communication, suggesting a much older evolutionary origin. In groundbreaking work from The University of Warwick, researchers have found that wild orangutans vocalise with a layered complexity previously thought to be unique to human communication, suggesting a much older evolutionary origin.
Consider the phrase -- 'This is the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat that ate the cheese'. It is a simple sentence comprised of repeated verb noun phrases -- 'chased the cat', 'ate the cheese' -- and is an example of layered complexity called recursion. Recursion is the repetition of language elements in an embedded way so that they form a comprehensible thought/phrase. Like Russian nesting dolls, the power of recursion mean we can combine a finite set of elements to deliver an infinite array of messages with increasing complexity. It is widely believed that nested communication is a unique feature of human language, allowing us greater complexity of thought, but research from The University of Warwick, published today inDr. Chiara De Gregorio, Research Fellow at The University of Warwick, who performed this work alongside Adriano Lameira and Marco Gamba , said:"When analysing the vocal data of alarm calls from female Sumatran orangutans, we found that the rhythmic structure of orangutans' sounds made were self-embedded across three levels -- an impressive third-order recursion. Finding this feature in orangutan communication challenges the idea that recursion is uniquely human."Individual sounds made by orangutans occurred in small combinations And these bouts could be grouped into even larger series , all with a regular rhythm at each level Just like a musical piece with repeating patterns, orangutans nested one rhythm inside another, and then another, creating a sophisticated multi-layered vocal structure, not thought possible by non-human great apes. This pattern wasn't accidental because orangutans also changed the rhythm of their alarm calls depending on the type of predator they encounter: When they saw a real threat, like a tiger, their calls were faster and more urgent. When they saw something that seemed like a threat but lacked the credibility of a real danger , their calls were slower and less regular. This ability to adapt vocal rhythms to different dangers shows that orangutans aren't just making noise, they are using structured vocal recursion to carry meaningful information about the outside world. "This discovery shows that the roots of one of the most distinctive features of human language -- recursion -- was already present in our evolutionary past," adds lead author Dr. De Gregorio."Orangutans are helping us understand how the seeds of language structure might have started growing millions of years ago." This research presents the first empirical support for the idea that these powerful recursive capacities could have been selected for and evolved incrementally in a much earlier ancestor.A new study comparing wild and zoo-housed Sumatran orangutans reveals that life in a zoo significantly alters how orangutans interact with their environment. Researchers analyzed over 12,000 ... Researchers have proposed a new evolutionary model for the origin of a kingdom of viruses called Bamfordvirae, suggesting a billion-years evolutionary arms race between two groups within this kingdom ... Acoustic communication is not only widespread in land vertebrates like birds and mammals, but also in reptiles, amphibians, and fishes. Many of them are usually considered mute, but in fact show ... Thought scientists agree that diet, geography and evolutionary history structure the microbiome, the relative influence of each factor is a mystery. No rigorous study has investigated all three at ...Fossil Tracks Show Reptiles Appeared on Earth Up to 40 Million Years Earlier
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