The researchers are going crazy.
a New scientific paper Recent research has revealed that chimpanzees have the ability to mimic human speech. Chimpanzees can make gestures They talk to each other like humans.
The new study looked at two archival videos of chimpanzees “uttering” words in front of a camera: one from the mid-2000s and the other from the 1960s.
In both cases, the chimps produced the word “mama” when given the cue from the keepers, which the researchers said overturns previous ideas that chimpanzees’ “neural wiring” goes beyond language capabilities.
“The vocal capabilities of great apes have been underestimated,” the study reads, “and chimpanzees possess the neural components necessary for vocalization.”
The more recent of the two instances, filmed at the Suncoast Primate Center in Palm Harbor, Florida, showed a chimpanzee named Johnny speaking the language in exchange for a red Twizzler, prompted by a zookeeper.
Johnny’s low-pitched intonation was eerily similar to Andy Serkis’ English-speaking chimp. Caesar from “Planet of the Apes” Movie series — as several commenters have pointed out 16 year old clip.
The researchers also noted that, according to the source of the video, Johnny ” [saying] His mother would buy him anything he wanted if he was on a diet.”
In 1962, Renata’s videoItalian chimpanzees, or “tree frogs,” also demonstrated the ability to speak a language when humans touched their chins, in what researchers called a form of “reinforcement learning.”
“Renata definitely pronounced it ‘mama,'” they wrote.
The two cases in which chimpanzees “had the necessary control” to produce human-like vocalizations demonstrate that primates can switch their vocalizations and jaw muscles to produce consonants and vowels, the scientists noted. We share almost 99% of our DNAin the end.
“It has therefore been argued that ‘mama’ may have been one of the first words to appear in human conversation,” the team suggested.
“Our data add to this picture: chimpanzees can generate putative ‘first words’ of spoken language.”
