Chimpanzees are one of mankind’s closest primate cousins. Researchers theorize that man and chimp share a common ancestor and nearly 99 percent of their DNA, according to the American Museum of Natural History. These fascinating monkeys are capable of many sophisticated human-like behaviors including “conversing” with each other in a language of nearly 400 words, creating tools, and teaching their chimp tribe how to use these tools.
Beyond the 2.2 percent of DNA not shared by man, what truly separates chimps from their homo sapien cousins. For many decades, researchers considered language to be the Great Divide, surmising that a combination of oral anatomy and brain development bestowed upon humans alone the gift of gab.
However, recently resurfaced footage from 60 years ago, combined with evolutionary theories that date back up to 25 million years ago are challenging this paradigm and suggesting that chimps may indeed be capable of learning to speak as humans do.
Resurfaced clips
The first clips, Phys.org features a chimp named Johnny who’d been adopted by a couple about two decades ago. Although Johnny was able to say the words “mama,” “papa,” and “cup,” these videos were not picked up by the scientific community at the time, since Johnny had been unethically removed from his natural chimp family.
In one such clip, the NYPost shares, Johnny very clearly articulates the word “Mama” when prompted to do so, in a low, deep voice, in return for a red Twizzler candy.
The study explains that Johnny “knew that [saying] Mama would get him anything he wanted as long as it was on his diet,” therefore, “We may infer that Johnny’s “mama” utterances, whatever their origin, appear to have been sustained through reinforcement. (i.e., rewards for given behavior).
Researchers suspect that the second clip, which features Renata, a chimp who lived in in Italy in the 1960s saying “Mama,” also includes evidence that Renata learned to utter the word via reinforcement learning.
Implications for human and chimp evolution
These video clips disprove the long-held notion that chimps were incapable of producing human-like speech either due to physiological differences in how the mouth is shaped or due to differences in the brain structure responsible for producing speech.
The study explains “Great ape vocal production capacities have been underestimated. Chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks necessary for speech,” at least under the right learning conditions.
Given that mama may have been one of the earliest words spoken by human ancestors somewhere between 50,000 and 25 million years ago, could it be that man’s first words developed and the vocabulary grew through some sort of social learning process? Could it be that chimps could expand their own language into the human realm given sufficient training now that it’s been demonstrated that they are anatomically capable of it?
These are provocative questions that researchers may one day be able to answer, allowing mankind to glimpse into the world of our ancestors and of our cousin primates. Researchers summed up these possibilities by explaining that, “It has been argued that “mama” may have been among the first words to appear in human speech. Our data complements this picture: chimpanzees can produce the putative ‘first words’ of spoken languages.”
