Orangutan squeaks reveal language evolution, says study
He found that the animals combined these purse-lipped, "consonant-like" calls to convey different messages.
This could be a glimpse of however our ancestors fashioned the earliest words.
The findings are revealed in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
"Human language is extraordinarily advanced and complicated - we will just about transmit any info we wish into sound," said Dr Reis e Lameira.
"So we tend to assume that perhaps words evolved from some rudimentary precursor to transmit a lot of advanced messages.
"We were basically mistreatment the pongid vocal behaviour as a time machine - back to a time once our ancestors were mistreatment what would become [those precursors] of consonants and vowels."
Building blocks
The team studied kiss squeaks in particular as a result of, like many consonants - the /t/, /p/, /k/ sounds - they depend on the action of the lips, tongue and jaw rather than the voice.
"Kiss squeaks do not involve vocal cord action, so they are acoustically and articulative consonant-like," explained Dr Reis e Lameira.
There has been very very little study of consonants in language analysis, but as academician fabric Wich from city John Moores University, a lead author in the study, explained, they are crucial building blocks within the evolution of language.
"Most human languages have a lot a lot of consonants than vowels," said academician Wich. "And if we have a lot of building blocks, we have a lot of mixtures."
The scientists recorded and analysed 4,486 kiss-squeaks collected from 48 animals in four wild populations.
With thousands of hours of listening as the apes communicated, the researchers found that the animals embedded several completely different bits of info in their squeaks.
The team compared this to how we have a tendency to would possibly use over one word to convey identicalthat means - expression "car" however conjointly "automobile" and "vehicle"
"They seemed to build doubly certain that the message was received, so they would send identical message with completely different [kiss squeak combination] signals,"
The scientists say their study suggests that, rather than a concerted effort to create advanced words, it might are this "redundancy" - forming completely different sounds that had identical that means, in order to strengthen a message - that drove early language evolution.
Dr Reis e Lameira added: "It's a way of constructing certain you do not find yourself in a very game of Chinese whispers."
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