The world of animal communication has long been thought to be a realm of simple signals and basic vocalizations. However, groundbreaking research from The University of Warwick is challenging this notion by revealing that wild orangutans possess a sophisticated form of communication previously believed to be uniquely human – the ability to create layered complexity through recursion.

Recursion, the repetition of language elements in an embedded way, allows for the creation of comprehensible thoughts or phrases. This complex concept has long been associated with human language, enabling us to convey intricate ideas and emotions. But research published in Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences shows that orangutans have taken this ability to a new level.

Dr. Chiara De Gregorio, Research Fellow at The University of Warwick, led the study alongside Adriano Lameira (also Warwick) and Marco Gamba (University of Torino). They analyzed the vocal data of alarm calls from female Sumatran orangutans and found that their sounds exhibit a self-embedded structure across three levels – an impressive third-order recursion. This finding challenges the long-held assumption that recursion is uniquely human.

The researchers discovered that the orangutans’ calls follow a musical-like pattern, with rhythms nested inside each other in a sophisticated multi-layered vocal structure. What’s more, they found that the orangutans adapt their vocal rhythms depending on the type of predator they encounter – faster and more urgent for real threats, slower and less regular for perceived but non-threatening stimuli.

This remarkable ability to convey meaningful information about the outside world through structured vocal recursion is a testament to the complexity and intelligence of wild orangutans. As Dr. De Gregorio notes, “This discovery shows that the roots of one of the most distinctive features of human language – recursion – was already present in our evolutionary past.”

Orangutans are helping us understand how the seeds of language structure might have started growing millions of years ago. This research presents the first empirical support for the idea that these powerful recursive capacities could have been selected for and evolved incrementally in a much earlier ancestor.

In conclusion, the hidden complexity of wild orangutans’ communication has shed new light on our understanding of animal intelligence and the evolution of language. As we continue to explore and study these remarkable creatures, we are reminded of the awe-inspiring capabilities that exist within the natural world.

A groundbreaking study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) has uncovered that wild Sumatran orangutan mothers exhibit unique parenting styles, even after accounting for biological, social, and environmental factors. The research team analyzed data on six maternal behaviors collected over 15 years, revealing consistent differences among mothers in their care-giving approaches.

Revathe Thillaikumar, a postdoctoral researcher at MPI-AB, stated that “our study shows that Sumatran orangutan mothers are not all the same when it comes to parenting behaviors.” For example, some mothers consistently carried their infants on their backs more frequently than others, while some terminated body contact more often. These differences remained consistent across each mother’s different offspring, even after controlling for known factors affecting maternal behavior.

The study also explored how maternal behavior changes as infants develop, given that Sumatran orangutans have the longest recorded infant dependency of any nonhuman animal. The researchers found that mothers made flexible adjustments to their parenting behaviors and consistently differed from one another in these adaptations. For instance, while all mothers tended to decrease spatial proximity more frequently as their infants grew older, some mothers did so more than others across all their offspring.

The study examined six essential maternal behaviors towards the infants: body contact, staying close, carrying, feeding nearby, and teaching skills directly. These behaviors significantly impact how infants learn and navigate dense canopies in a tropical rainforest. Data were collected at the Suaq Balimbing research site in Indonesia from 22 mother-infant pairs over more than 6000 observational hours.

Caroline Schuppli, a group leader at MPI-AB, concluded that “the consistent differences among mothers – both in the extent of their behaviors and in how these behaviors changed over the course of infant development – suggest that orangutans may possess individual maternal personalities.” The researchers noted that they do not yet understand whether these differences bring about variations in aspects of infant development. They plan to accumulate more data over a decade to investigate the effect of these differences on infant development, shedding further light on the complexities of orangutan parenting styles.

The human capacity for language has long been considered unique to our species. However, recent studies have challenged this notion by revealing that chimpanzees possess a complex communication system that rivals that of humans in terms of its combinatorial potential. Researchers from the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology and Cognitive and Brain Sciences, along with colleagues from the Cognitive Neuroscience Center Marc Jeannerod and Neuroscience Research Center in Lyon, France, have recorded thousands of vocalizations from wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast.

Their findings reveal that chimpanzees employ four distinct methods to alter meanings when combining single calls into two-call combinations. These include compositional and non-compositional combinations, analogous to the key linguistic principles in human language. The study also highlights the versatility of these combinations, which are used in a wide range of contexts beyond mere predator alerts.

One of the most significant aspects of this research is that it suggests that chimpanzees’ complex communication system may be more similar to human language than previously thought. This has implications for our understanding of the origins of language and the evolutionary history of humans. The study’s authors propose that the capacity for complex combinatorial capacities was already present in the common ancestor of humans and great apes, challenging the views of the last century that communication in great apes is fixed and linked to emotional states.

This research opens up new avenues for investigation into the evolution of language and highlights the importance of studying the communicative capabilities of our closest living relatives. As Cédric Girard-Buttoz, first author on the study, notes, “Our findings suggest a highly generative vocal communication system, unprecedented in the animal kingdom… This changes the views of the last century which considered communication in the great apes to be fixed and linked to emotional states, and therefore unable to tell us anything about the evolution of language.”