Bonobos have mastered the art of babytalk, new research shows

The bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee – humankind’s closest living relative – has mastered the human art of babytalk. That is, it makes a range of sounds that must be interpreted in context. It may not be language, but it parallels those sounds that human infants make to communicate before they learn to use words, according to new research by Zanna Clay, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham.

Bonobos: our endangered 'cousins' in the heart of the Congo basin

She and colleagues from the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland and St Andrews University in Scotland analysed a range of short, high-pitched peeps produced by bonobos in the Congo forests and found that they made such noises in positive, negative and neutral circumstances.

That means that fellow apes resting, nesting, feeding, travelling or grooming each other had to interpret the signals according to context. The noises were not the human equivalents of laughter or crying or shrieks of alarm, which psychologists call “responses to stimuli”. They sounded very like communication. And the observation suggests a possible evolutionary origin for human language.

“”When I studied the bonobos in their native setting in the Congo, I was struck by how frequent their peeps were, and how many different contexts they produce them in,” said Dr Clay. “It became apparent we couldn’t always differentiate between peeps. We needed to understand the context to get to the root of their communication 

.”

FacebookTwitterPinterest Wild bonobos feeding on lillypads. During feeding, bonobos frequently produce peep vocalizations as well as in other contexts. Photograph: Zanna Clay/Lui Kotale Bonobo Project

Chimpanzees, like other animals, can improvise tools, co-operate and communicate by using recognisable signals. But the great apes, and the pygmy chimpanzee Pan paniscus in particular, go much further. Different groups of apes in different parts of Africa have developed different ways of finding, sharing and consuming food: that is, they have evolved a tribal or family culture. Bonobos demonstrate altruism, they form political alliances, they support each other and they use sex to smooth over social differences. In laboratory studies, they have shown an ability to count, to solve puzzles and to interpret situations.


But until now, they have produced nothing that humans would recognise as language. They still haven’t, but Dr Clay and her colleagues report in the open access journal PeerJ, the bonobo “peeps” sound very like the kind of noises – the academic word for them is protophones – produced by human babies in the first months of life. Their study concludes: “Our data suggest that the capacity for functional flexibility has evolutionary roots that predate the evolution of human speech. We interpret this evidence as an example of an evolutionary early transition away from fixed vocal signalling towards functional flexibility.”

That is: the roots of human language may have evolved in some common ancestor more than six million years ago, and one form of this survived in the bonobo community, while humans took the prototype peep and went on, as the poet William Blake observed “piping down the valleys wild”, to evolve poetry, party political broadcasts and incomprehensible Android manuals.

But the logic is that human babies and their wild cousins have something in common. They can both peep to express a mood or share a sensation.

“We felt that it was premature to conclude that this ability is uniquely human especially as no one had really looked for it in the great apes. It appears that the more we look, the more similarity we find between humans and animals,” said Dr Clay.

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