Primate Vocalizations Are Much More Than Gibberish

Nonhuman primates clearly do more than just screech meaningless sounds at each other, but what are the limits of their communication?

By Jay Schwartz

A chimpanzee is strolling along a trail through the lush Budongo Forest in Uganda when he spots a deadly Gaboon viper. Chimps have an alarm call for scenarios like these: a soft “hoo” grunt that alerts others to potential danger. But there’s no point in alerting his group mates if they’re already aware of the threat. So what does he do?

This is the question that Catherine Crockford, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and her colleagues were keen to answer. They are the ones who’d put the viper — a convincing model made out of wire mesh and plaster — in the chimp’s path. It sounds like a silly prank, trying to surprise a chimp with a model snake. But the researchers were trying to get at an elusive and profound question: How much of what a chimp “says” is intentional communication?

Researchers have spent decades endeavoring to unravel the depth of communication that nonhuman primates can achieve. Do they have words as we would think of them? Do they have grammar? Since language is so integral to our identity as humans, these questions get to the heart of what it means to be human. While the public tends to imbue every cat meow and dog bark with meaning, scientists have traditionally taken a much more conservative approach, favoring the least cognitive explanations and assuming that animal vocalizations are involuntary and emotional. “Conservatism is essential if animal cognition work is to be taken seriously,” says Slocombe.

We can’t see inside primate brains (at least not without a lot of practical and ethical difficulty), or ask primates what they mean or why they vocalize. So primate-communication researchers have been forced to devise clever studies to work out what’s going on in their subjects’ minds.

Related posts:

South Korean Parasite shocked at the Oscars, Joaquin Phoenix became the 2nd person to win an Academy Award for playing Joker, and Billie Eilish released a brand new James Bond theme song. When…

How might we make it possible to leave belongings with unattended bikes without worrying that they will be stolen? That warm up game I came up with was called “Yes and Did You See…” To play, the…

Kristen Duda is the VP of Strategic Alliances at Intelex Technologies, and she is striving to build a partner centric culture at her company. Intelex is a SaaS company for environmental health…