Re: Chimpanzees gesture back and forth quickly like in human conversations

Pandora wrote:

Op 23-07-2024 om 06:44 schreef Primum Sapienti:

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https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1051557
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See also:
 Chimpanzee utterances refute purported missing links for novel vocalizations and syllabic speech
 Abstract
 Nonhuman great apes have been claimed to be unable to learn human words due to a lack of the necessary neural circuitry. We recovered original footage of two enculturated chimpanzees uttering the word “mama” and subjected recordings to phonetic analysis. Our analyses demonstrate that chimpanzees are capable of syllabic production, achieving consonant-to-vowel phonetic contrasts via the simultaneous recruitment and coupling of voice, jaw and lips. In an online experiment, human listeners naive to the recordings’ origins reliably perceived chimpanzee utterances as syllabic utterances, primarily as “ma-ma”, among foil syllables. Our findings demonstrate that in the absence of direct data-driven examination, great ape vocal production capacities have been underestimated. Chimpanzees possess the neural building blocks necessary for speech.
 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-67005-w

Hmmm. This seems to have just made the recent news.
Link has a video.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/25/science/chimpanzee-speech-mama.html
The Chimps Who Learned to Say ‘Mama’
Old recordings show captive chimps uttering
the word, which some scientists believe may
offer clues to the origins of human speech.