In more than 900 hours of recordings from wild chimpanzees, researchers heard hundreds of unique phrases that could resemble a language.
Liran Samuni / Taï Chimpanzee Project.Chimpanzees howl. They squeak. They bark. And sometimes, they scream, then grunt, then bark, and then scream, all in a row., that series of expressions might carry its own meaning, almost like a chimp phrase.
Biologists previously knew that chimpanzees build their calls out of a handful of distinct sounds, almost like letters: grunts, hoos, barks, screams, and roars. They can either spit out a single noise, or “pant” a string of them, inhaling between each beat. The pants are used to communicate through the jungle, making them particularly tantalizing for people trying to understand chimp talk.
As it turns out, chimps are particularly fond of a few combinations: hoot-pant-grunt, hoot-pant-hoot, and pant-hoot-pant-scream. Sometimes, they combined two separate “units” into much longer phrases—two-thirds of the primates were heard belting out five-part cries. By combining the letters, the chimps had roughly 400 calls in their vocabulary.
Bortolato and her colleagues also didn’t figure out what the phrases they recorded meant. It’s possible that the order of the sequences matter, however: Certain chimp sounds tended to come at the beginning of phrases, while others were always placed at the end.
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