Chimpanzees Apparently Able to Talk to Humans: Researchers

Researchers are going crazy.

a New scientific paper Chimpanzees are reportedly “able” to make sounds that mimic the words they hear from humans. This comes on the heels of recent research showing that chimpanzees can gesture to each other during conversation just like humans.

The new research looked at two archival clips of chimpanzees “uttering” words on camera — one from the mid-2000s, the other from the 1960s.

In both cases, the monkeys said “mama” when they received cues from their trainers. This, the researchers noted, contradicts previous beliefs that speech was outside the “neural circuitry” of chimpanzees.

“The ability of great apes to produce sounds has been underestimated, while chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks necessary for speech,” the study said.

In the most recent example, filmed inside the Suncoast Primate Center in Palm Harbor, Florida, a chimpanzee named Johnny said the word in exchange for a red Twizzler when his caretaker asked him to say it.

Johnny’s deep cadence sounded eerily similar to that of the fluent English-speaking chimpanzee Andy Serkis. Caesar from the planet of the apes The film’s excellence – as many commentators have pointed out – On a 16 year old clip.

The researchers also noted that according to the origin of the video, Johnny “knew that [saying] His mother would bring him anything he wanted as long as it was within his diet.

In 1962, Snapshots of RenataAnother study by researchers in Italy showed chimpanzees saying the word when their chin was touched by a human — a form of “reinforcement learning,” the researchers called it.

“Renata reliably produced the word ‘mama’,” they wrote.

The scientists noted that the two cases in which chimpanzees had “necessary control” over human-like speech constitute evidence that primates are able to move speech muscles and the jaw for consonant and vowel sounds. It makes up about 99% of our shared DNA.After all,

Accordingly, some have argued that the word “mama” may have been among the first words to appear in human speech, the research team suggested.

“Our data complete this picture: chimpanzees are capable of producing the so-called ‘first words’ of spoken languages.”