Monkey chatter smacks of human speech, researcher says
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-me-sci-sn-talking-monkeys-20130408,0,3583780.story
It makes a lot of sense to me that speech evolved gradually and that we would be able to find more primitive versions all around. One of the major conundrums surrounding the evolution of birds was ‘how the hell did they ever evolve flight feathers’? Well recent research seems to have rather conclusively concluded that the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct after all, we are surrounded by them: birds. Early bipedal dinosaurs were probably covered with feathers from birth and likely relied on garish displays to woo mates. It is quite plausible that, much like peacocks today, feathers that are now used for flight were initially used to impress members of the opposite sex and only ‘accidentally’ used for flight. I suspect, then, that the vocalizations mentioned in the article are indeed speech, just speech that is more primitive by virtue of being able to make fewer variations, thus a smaller vocabulary. Indeed, if the face is a strong part of primate conversation we wouldn’t even know it by listening to them. Certainly amongst humans more information is conveyed through body language and facial changes, so much so that people had to invent ’emoticons’ to convey the same information in test ;-). I suspect that if we as a species weren’t so stuck on ourselves we might realize that animals have rich language skills and we are just dummies for not knowing it. Perhaps that is why the Neanderthals did so well for so long.
