While this open-ended, combinatorial nature is central to human communication, understanding where this capacity originated remains a fundamental scientific question. Researchers often examine the vocal behaviors of other animals, particularly primates, to trace the evolutionary roots of this complex trait.
While primates typically rely on single, context-specific calls, some species exhibit more flexible call combinations, albeit far fewer in number and typically linked to specific contexts, such as predator warnings.
New research led by scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, along with colleagues from the Cognitive Neuroscience Center Marc Jeannerod and the Neuroscience Research Center in Lyon, France, provides fresh insights into this topic.
These researchers have spent years recording thousands of vocalizations from three groups of wild chimpanzees in the Tai National Park, Ivory Coast, to understand how these primates might combine their calls to convey more complex meanings.
The study reveals that chimpanzees use four distinct strategies to create new meanings from call combinations, reflecting principles found in human language. For example, they observed compositional combinations, where individual call meanings are merged (e.g., A = feeding, B = resting, AB = feeding + resting), and clarified meanings (e.g., A = feeding or traveling, B = aggression, AB = traveling).
They also identified non-compositional idiomatic combinations, where combined calls form entirely new meanings (e.g., A = resting, B = affiliation, AB = nesting). Unlike previous studies that focused on limited call contexts, these findings suggest a much broader range of call combinations used in diverse social settings.
"Our findings suggest a highly generative vocal communication system, unprecedented in the animal kingdom, which echoes recent findings in bonobos suggesting that complex combinatorial capacities were already present in the common ancestor of humans and these two great ape species," said Cedric Girard-Buttoz, the study's first author.
"This changes the views of the last century which considered communication in the great apes to be fixed and linked to emotional states, and therefore unable to tell us anything about the evolution of language. Instead, we see clear indications here that most call types in the repertoire can shift or combine their meaning when combined with other call types."
Research Report:Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion
Related Links
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
All About Human Beings and How We Got To Be Here
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
