Orangutan Holds Key To Speech Evolution

An adolescent orangutan could provide the key to understanding how speech in humans evolved. An Orangutan named Rocky has begun to speak, copying the sounds of human words in a conversational context, in a study which could rewrite how speech evolved. It had been though that great apes were not able to do this and since human speech is a learned behavior, it could not have originated from them. Researchers conducted a game in which Rocky mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made 500 vowel-like calls. Rocky was able to learn new sounds and control the action of his voice in the way humans do when they conduct a conversation, the scientists concluded. Eight year old Rocky was studied at Indianapolis Zoo in the US, where he still lives, between April and May 2012. His calls were compared with sounds collected from more than 12,000 hours of observations of more than 120 orangutans from 15 wild and captive populations.

Lead researcher Dr Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, said, “It’s not clear how spoken language evolved from the communication systems of the ancestral great apes.” “Instead of learning new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by arousal over which they have no control, but our research proves that orangutans have the potential capacity to control the action of their voices.”

The findings indicate that the voice control shown by humans could derive from an evolutionary ancestor with similar voice control capacities as those found in orangutans and in all great apes more generally. This opens up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans.

The findings of the research, which also involved universities in the Netherlands, Germany, the USA and Liverpool John Moores University, are published in the latest issue of the journal Scientific Reports. A previous study led by Dr Lameira when he was based at the University of Amsterdam found that a female orangutan called Tilda was able to make sounds that had the same rhythm and pace as human speech ends.

Source-Medindia