Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus raised his hand in the middle of the great European Renaissance party and refuted the idea that the Earth is the center of the universe. Naturalist Charles Darwin did the same amid the scientific revolution, removing the human being’s protagonism in natural history. For decades, lost and misplaced, humans were pleased to be at least the only animal species with language.
Scholars used to say that the language was truly ours. Well, it doesn’t look like it is.
And we’ve confirmed it in the strangest way possible: by watching old videos. Phonetician and cognitive scientist Axel Ekström and a team of European specialists in language and comparative psychology painstakingly reviewed a series of historical recordings of chimpanzees who had managed to say “mama.”
There are two famous recordings. That of Johny, made in 2007 at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Florida, and that of Renata, who appeared in a short Universal Studios documentary made in Italy in 1962.
Analyzing chimpanzees. The researchers quickly realized that the videos had a lot in common. The two chimpanzees appeared to reproduce the words in the direction of their caregivers, suggesting that they could learn to speak through imitation and reinforcement.
On the other hand, phonetic analysis confirmed that the chimpanzees could produce the syllable structure necessary to say “mama,” particularly the consonant-vowel phonetic contrasts that require significant coordination between the voice and the mouth.
Resolving a historical question. The consensus is that chimpanzees’ limitations are due to throat physiology, articulatory control, and physio-neurological differences. In what is known as the “Kuypers-Jürgens hypothesis,” ethnologists believed that the neural underdevelopment of language in primates resulted from an inability to control the phonatory apparatus.
There was no evidence, but the researchers didn’t need it either. In fact, for decades, experts assumed that “learning vocal production arose again in the human lineage after it diverged from present-day non-human great apes.”
But Ekström’s paper shatters that idea. Without laboratory data, its findings make it clear that “chimpanzees can recreate human phonemes,” meaning that “the vocal production capabilities of great apes have been underestimated.”
What does all this mean? It means that we need to do more research. First, no one seriously thought this was something to study because great apes are protected. But anyway, historically, language research in these animals has been minimal.
And it shouldn’t be. It’s the best way to understand human language and ourselves.
This article was written by Javier Jiménez and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Image | Mr. Theklan
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