A recent study conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich and published in the journal Science revealed surprising findings regarding the communication abilities of bonobo apes, the closest living ancestors of humans.
The study showed that these apes use complex, meaningful sound structures, very similar to the way words are constructed in human language. These findings challenge previous notions about the uniqueness of human communication and suggest that some fundamental aspects of language may have ancient evolutionary origins.
The researchers relied on observing the behavior of wild bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For the first time, they used advanced linguistic methodologies to analyze these animals' communication patterns.
The research team was able to demonstrate that bonobo vocal communication relies on "combinarity," a linguistic property that enables meaningful sound units to be combined into larger structures, with the final meaning dependent on the meaning of the individual units and how they are combined.
Scientists created a kind of "bonobos dictionary," recording all the sounds made by these apes and associating them with specific meanings. They then studied how these sounds were combined and how this combination affected the final meaning.
The results revealed a surprising similarity between bonobo vocal structures and the complex language structures of humans.
"Since humans and bonobos share a common ancestor that lived 7-13 million years ago, it's not surprising that they have similar traits," explained study co-author Professor Martin Surbeck of Harvard University. "But our findings suggest that the structural property of language may be much older than we thought, dating back at least 7 million years."