British researchers analyze consonant and vowel sounds produced by orangutans to explain the birth of human language
We now know a little more about the way orangutans communicate, and the study of their recognizable “howls” in the wild has overturned the most widely accepted theories so far about the origin of human language.
nature’s call
They don’t scream, like chimpanzees, and tend to live most of their serene lives in silence. However, their communication is extremely rich, they use vowels and consonants in a way very similar to human speech.
the biologist serge that, from the University of Zurich, recorded for two years the vocalizations of orangutans in different cities of Sumatra and Borneo. What showed that the vocalizations are different in each group, so it is a cultural trait. In his study, he found the meaning of some very special vocalizations, for example, the “come here” from a mother to her cub.
But the most characteristic sounds of orangutans are the lingering howls of sexually mature males, which can be heard through a mile of dense jungle. These sounds are what served for a new study, which found that the medium by which the message is carried, the transmission channel, played a fundamental role in the evolution of language, possibly even shaping the first words.
The origin of human language
Experts believe that the first words of human language emerged after a process of evolution. The first sounds evolved, until they found a “form” that could be understood, even from a great distance. So the first words must have been the “best sounds”. Likewise, the birth of grammar is explained as the necessary evolution of language so that messages can be understood by the entire community. And how do you get that perfect sound? How does this evolve to fix a word?
Experts place their magnifying glass on three key points. the sender, someone who speaks a word, (a male orangutan in heat at the top of a tree is worth it); a way through which this sound propagates (the jungle in this case) and finally a receiver, in this case, the woman who will answer the call.
Many studies on the origin of language focus on the “sender”, ie the orangutan, and look at how the human brain and the entire system that allows us to speak has evolved over thousands of years to explain why we have a language. complex and they don’t. Studying the morphology of the emitter is how they were able to demonstrate, for example, that Neanderthals spoke like us.
The receiver of the message and the evolution of the Auditory System are also studied. In an adult human, the ears have the ability to recognize and distinguish around 400,000 different sounds, linked to speech, music and sounds produced by man and nature. The sophistication of the ear makes it possible to differentiate whether the sound is emitted by a violin or a flute, and thousands of subtleties of language, such as accents, intonation or languages.
The evolution of the brain, speech system and auditory system in our species has been the main objective when trying to explain how the first words of a language as complex as ours were born. But there is one key missing factor in communication to be taken into account: the channel, the medium through which the call is propagated.
In studying orangutan vocalizations, experts have emphasized this third factor: the channel through which the message is conveyed, and the conclusion is that it plays a much more important role than previously believed. According to his conclusions, for the orangutan’s howl to reach the other side of the jungle without losing its meaning, it must be a “howl” with special characteristics, which will not be affected by the distance it will have to travel. Thus, the medium will have a fundamental role to discard the sounds that do not reach their goal and, after years of evolution, find the perfect sound. Could the first word be born like this?
Researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, England, analyzed the audios with orangutan chants, in which sounds similar to consonants and vowels are recognized, which do not lose their meaning when traveling through the jungle, and reach the receivers intact.
Male orangutan howls or bellows were recorded again throughout the rainforest at fixed distances of 25, 50, 75 and 100 meters. Finally, the quality and content of the received signals were examined.
Scientists found that although signal quality had declined, the content was still intact, even over long distances. In fact, the message information remained intact until it became inaudible.
The message unchanged
O Dr. Adriano Lameira, the studio director explains it this way: “We know that the sound degrades the further away you are from the receiver. We’ve all felt this effect when yelling at a family member or friend. They don’t hear every word you say, but they recognize that you are talking to them and that it is your voice. Using communication sounds from great apes, which are closest to those used by our hominid ancestors, we show that although the sound is distorted, the content remains the same. It’s an appeal to the scientific community to start thinking again about how language evolved.
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