Researchers are going crazy.
A new scientific study reveals that chimpanzees are “capable” of producing sounds that mimic words they hear from humans. The study follows recent research that found that chimpanzees can gesture to each other during conversations, just like humans.
The new research looked at two archived videos of chimpanzees “speaking” words into a camera – one clip from the mid-2000s and another from the 1960s.
In both cases, the monkeys said the word “mom” when their owners gave them cues. This contradicts beliefs that speech is outside the chimpanzees’ “neural circuit,” the researchers noted.
“The vocal production capabilities of great apes have been underestimated,” the article reads. “Chimpanzees have the neural elements necessary for speech.”
The most recent example of the two, filmed inside the Suncoast Primate Center in Palm Harbor, Florida, saw a chimp named Johnny utter the word in exchange for a red Twizzler when his keeper prompted him to say it.
Johnny’s low cadence sounded eerily similar to that of the English-speaking chimpanzee Caesar, played by Andy Serkis in the “Planet of the Apes” film franchise, as several commenters on the 16-year-old clip pointed out.
The researchers also noted that, depending on the origin of the video, Johnny “knew that [saying] Mom gave him whatever he wanted, as long as it was part of his diet.
In 1962, footage of Renata, a chimpanzee in Italy, also showed her saying the word when a human touched her chin. Researchers called this a form of “reinforcement learning.”
“Renata always produced ‘mom’,” they wrote.
The two cases where chimps “possessed the necessary control” to speak like humans demonstrate that primates can modify their speech and jaw muscles for consonants and vowels, the scientists noted. After all, there is nearly 99 percent shared DNA.
“Accordingly, it has been proposed that ‘mum’ may have been among the first words to appear in human language,” the research team suggested.
“Our data complete this picture: chimpanzees can produce the so-called ‘first words’ of spoken languages.”
