7/6/2023 0 Comments Chimpanzee test![]() Scientists have learned that great ape vocabularies overlap extensively: about 95 percent of bonobos’ gestures are the same as those chimpanzees use. The work fills a hole in the case for a shared linguistic lineage. “Maybe this is something that was shared with our last common ancestor and that we, in fact, retain, this ability to understand and use the great ape gestures,” Graham says. The finding suggests that humans still have some grasp of this ancestral vocabulary. “Humans without any training and without seeing any of the outcomes or surrounding behaviors can understand what chimpanzee and bonobo gestures mean,” Graham says. In the study, when thousands of people watched online videos of wild apes raising an arm, scratching and striking various poses, they got the gist of the animals’ lingo far more often than would be expected by chance. They show that our species can make a pretty good guess of the meanings of chimp and bonobo gestures, another hint that language may have evolved from an elaborate system of hand and body signals. ![]() In a paper published today in PLOS Biology, Graham and Hobaiter provide startling evidence that this ancestral ability may persist in modern humans. “They are using gestures in a way that is more languagelike, and so there’s this theory that human language might have evolved from this gestural basis,” Graham says. The gestures of both species, which are humans’ two closest relatives, are more complex and varied than their vocalizations, which mainly reflect urgent needs such as finding food or spotting predators.īy contrast, the apes’ gestures serve as a deliberate way of conveying specific everyday goals, leading some scientists to believe that these signals are the precursors to human language. Andrews colleague Catherine Hobaiter built a similar body-language dictionary by observing the East African chimpanzees at the Budongo Central Forest Reserve in Uganda. And when it cups its hand under another’s chin, it is asking for food. This work has confirmed, for example, that when one of the animals repeatedly swipes the black fuzz on its chest, it is begging to be groomed. Andrews in Scotland has spent hundreds of hours among this screeching, scratching endangered troupe to decode its members’ nonverbal interactions. Primatologist Kirsty Graham of the University of St. Like other great apes, these animals have a rich social life, communicating with their fellows using some 80 types of gestures. Based on real, cutting-edge science, Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee? makes us laugh, makes us think and above all makes us question our assumptions about our place in the animal kingdom.In the forest near Wamba, a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some of the last remaining bonobos breed, feed and lounge in the trees. ![]() Along the way, Ambridge debunks a plethora of common myths about animals and reveals the bizarre and wonderful science being done at the extreme end of zoology, where animal psychologists are designing personality tests for donkeys and logic problems for pigeons. ![]() Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee? is a collection of ingenious tests, puzzles, quizzes and games that pits the reader against a range of extraordinary creatures to show that, from dolphins that understand grammar to parrots that can add up, via fetishist quails and the ant-swarms outsmarting the world's best mathematicians, the animal kingdom is more than a match for anything mankind has to offer. But all animals - us included - are pretty special. What makes humans special? What makes us different from animals? Psy-Q author Ben Ambridge's entertaining, illuminating new book has a surprising answer: less than you might think. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |