Why Don’t Chimpanzees Talk?

Language is one of humans oddest characteristics but chimps too can develop it.Language is one of humans oddest characteristics but chimps too can develop it – By Dr Walter Tarello (DVM)

If you take a chimpanzee born in the New York Zoo and place it back in its African original habitat he will have little trouble communicating with its peers. This is because all chimps share a common small repertoire of hoots, screams, grunts and barks. Humans are definitely more flexible.

Our brain can hold a huge range of abstractions so we have evolved an open ended form of communication to express our thoughts.

Given that we are genetically and evolutionary speaking, very close, why don’t chimps talk?

Superior sequence processing abilities may have helped our forefathers to develop speech when chimps could not. Innate non-arbitrary tendency to link sounds and sights is thought to play a crucial role in language evolution.

It could have been advantageous to our ancestors to associate the name ‘lulla’ to a rounded shape and the name ‘zizi’ to a spiky shape, for instance, because instinctively we find it easier to learn the names of rounded objects whose names use rounded vowels.

Most people are not aware of the associations they make, but for some worlds the connection between sound and sight is stronger.

Now for the first time scientist Vera Ludwig and colleagues in Germany have discovered that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) also make cross-sensory associations, suggesting that chimp brains have the rudimentary wiring to develop a language.

Chimps were seen to link sounds with level of brightness of light, a type of connection that underlies the phenomenon called synaesthesia in humans. As a matter of fact, synaesthetes make unusual connections between different senses.

Some perceive a certain taste when they hear Bach music, while others see numbers as colours. This is a much more common experience than you might think, partially explaining how our ancestors took the first step from ape-like screams to a decently understandable vocabulary.

Some chimps may find that music by Bach tastes bitter. However, it remains to be seen if this experience helps them to develop a common vocabulary and to understand the words that others use.

Printed in Petigree Magazine Aug / Sep 2013 issue