A new study was published today in the PeerJ online journal that investigates the incredibly flexible vocal abilities of bonobos—one of our closest relatives, with DNA 99% identical to humans. Researchers involved in the study say that this allows them to communicate in a way similar to human babies, begging the question of whether or not bonobos are the first animal other than ourselves to be discovered with the gift of language.
(Spoiler alert: they’re not).
Baby Garble
When babies are hungry, or tired, or need to fill their diapers, they cry, or make some kind of singular noise. Here, the method of communication isn’t so much about the sound that the baby makes itself, but the context of the sound. Babies use these sounds, which encompass a wide variety of contexts, simply to draw attention to whatever situation they are in. This method of communication, called functional flexibility, was thought to be exclusively found in humans, until recent studies have proved otherwise.
Bonobo Garble
Whereas the ability to test communication skills in chimps—our other closest relative—has been tested many times, researchers have more or less ignored the testing of bonobos.To test these skills, Zanna Clay of the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology led a team of researchers to the Democratic Republic of Congo , where they observed a family of 39 bonobos. Here, they discovered that bonobos use a single “peep” sound to communicate a variety of meanings, including showing aggression, hunger, and exhaustion. This display of functional flexibility in our close relatives is remarkably similar to how pre-linguistic infants communicate.
But is it “Language?”
The short answer is, no. While the discovery of functional flexibility in a creature other than ourselves is nothing short of remarkable, according to linguistic experts, communication among bonobos contain some but not all requirements for language abilities equal to that of humans.
There is a reason why we don’t say that animals use “language” to speak to each other, and use the term “animal communication” instead. This is because when animals communicate to each other, they do so purely out of survival instinct, whereas humans can use abstract thought to communicate thoughts and emotions irrelevant to our context.
Many tests have been done in teaching different types of primates sign language, such as the famous Koko the gorilla, who researchers claimed to have learned sign language. Many have yielded surprisingly optimistic results, with cases such as Koko’s in which apes were able to successfully communicate their feelings using human language.
However, according to linguistics expert Noam Chomsky, there has never been a single case in which apes didn’t “learn” the language taught purely out of survival instinct. In this sense, Chomsky believes that these animals didn’t actually “learn” how to use sign language on their own, but were instead taught to use it as a tool for survival when interacting with humans, far from any abstract or original thought.
So in short, no—bonobos can’t speak any sort of language that’s as sophisticated and abstract as our own. But they can communicate in some fascinating ways that up until now science deemed only present in humans, warranting much more research involving the bonobo’s vocal abilities.
You can totally hang out with monkeys in VR:
