![]() ![]() They hit a distinctively high note when they came across the bread, and but made lower and noisier grunts for apples. ![]() Chimpanzees prefer bread to apples, and Slocombe and Zuberbuhler discovered a corresponding difference in the rough grunts they made for each food. Andrews in Scotland, investigated a particular noise chimpanzees make when they find food, called a "rough grunt." At the Edinburgh Zoo, the scientists fed the chimpanzees two different foods-apples and bread-and recorded the sounds they made. Katie Slocombe and Kaus Zuberbuhler, two primatologists at the University of St. Only later, this argument goes, did the sophisticated brain circuitry for reading gestures get rewired in humans to process speech.īut don't write off those grunts and hoots just yet, at least according to a new study that appears in the Oct. This communication system might have grown more complex after our own ancestors split from other apes 6 million years ago. These so-called "mirror neurons" might have given apes the mental power necessary to recognize subtle differences in hand gestures. Scientists who favor this theory point to the fact that monkeys have special neurons that track the motion of hands. This research helped give rise to a theory that human language has its roots not in speech, but in hand gestures. ![]() Jane Goodall On The Challenges Of Communicating With Chimps The fact that the gestures don't come randomly suggests they carry some meaning. Particularly provocative was the fact that chimpanzees used certain gestures only in certain situations-trying to get another chimp's attention, for example, or playing, or picking a fight. But scientists were struck by the rich vocabulary of gestures chimpanzees use. The sounds made by chimpanzees seemed to be little more than emotional outbursts without much meaning or intention. The San Francisco Zoo’s most famous great ape was the subject of a 1978 movie by Barbet Schroeder and a more recent PBS documentary, “A Conversation with Koko.For some time now, primatologists have paid more attention to the hands of chimps than their mouths. Penny Patterson began teaching Koko the gorilla to sign in 1972, and Koko reportedly mastered anywhere from 350 to 1,000 words. Other observers were skeptical about the chimp’s abilities, arguing that Washoe never used signs either creatively or spontaneously, but merely mimicked her trainers’ cues, much like the early 20th-century carnival horse known as Clever Hans, who entertained crowds by working simple arithmetic problems until a psychologist proved that he was really watching his trainer’s unconscious body language to signal the right answer.Ĭlever Hans entertaining a festive but gullible crowdĪfter Washoe’s early success, researchers tried signing with other primates. Unlike Washoe, fellow-chimp Bonzo, seen with co-star and president-to-be Ronald Reagan in the 1951 cult classic, “Bedtime for Bonzo,” was not a great communicator, but a fictional character, a creation of the media The Gardners adopted Washoe as an infant and taught her as many as 130 signs, impressing many researchers with her ability to combine signs to create new “words,” for example signing “water” and “bird” when she saw a swan. Anthropomorphic malevolent plants looking all innocent in Roger Corman’s “Little Shop of Horrors” (1960)īefore Washoe came along, researchers had tried and failed to teach primates spoken language, but in the 1960s Allen and Beatrix Gardner thought that since chimpanzees communicated with one another using gestures as well as cries, they might be able to learn sign language to talk with humans. ![]()
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