Young chimps develop language in the same way that human babies do.
The traditional creationist argument for the daft notion that humans were specially created without ancestors and are thus a different sort of creation to the other animals, is normally to point at unique characteristics of humans, oblivious of the fact that, by definition, any species will have unique characteristics that define it as a distinct species.
One of these supposedly unique abilities is the ability to communicate with complex languages. This again ignores the fact that orcas or killer whales form social groupings with unique cultures and vocalizations with which they communicate with members of their own pod.
Now research by scientists from the University of Portsmouth in England, the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, and Université Clermont Auvergne in France have shown that there are clear similarities between the development of language in humans and the development of vocal communication in chimpanzees, strongly pointing to its origin in a common ancestor.
The research team led by Dr Derry Taylor of the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Psychology, is published open access, in the Cell Press journal, iScience. Their research is explained in a press release from the University of Portsmouth:
Scientists examining the evolutionary roots of language say they’ve discovered chimp vocal development is not far off from humansThe open access research paper published in iScience gives more technical details:
A study has provided evidence that young chimpanzees are capable of vocal functional flexibility; a known building block in human language development.
The ability to produce sounds that can fulfil a variety of functions is fundamental to how we learn to speak, but it has long been believed that non-human primates don’t share this skill.
Human babies make noises that have specific purposes. Screams, laughs and cries for instance all have a rigid purpose and clear emotion attached to them. But there are other free speech sounds, like pre-babbling, that are more flexible in their function.
New research has found that infant and juvenile chimps demonstrate a similar vocal flexibility, which implies the foundations for speech are rooted in our primate evolutionary heritage.
The paper, published in iScience, is one of the first systematic studies of early chimp vocal production and function.All living things communicate, but only humans communicate using language. How this came to be is an unsolved mystery within science.
Until now we didn’t have evidence of vocal functional flexibility in non-human primates early on. This discovery holds profound implications for our understanding of the origins of human language.
Dr Derry Taylor, lead author
Department of Psychology
University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK
Highlights
- Most immature chimpanzee call types are stereotyped in how they are produced.
- Grunts were flexibly expressed and showed a corresponding flexibility in function.
- A key developmental foundation for language appears rooted in our primate ancestry.
Summary
All living things communicate yet only humans can be said to communicate using language. How this came to be the case is a fundamental mystery unsolved by contemporary science. Within a human lifetime, language emerges from a complex developmental process. As such, understanding chimpanzee vocal development is essential to understanding the evolutionary roots of language. In human development, language is directly built upon the early capacity for “vocal functional flexibility”—the ability to flexibly express the same vocalizations in different ways to achieve different functions. Primate vocalizations, by contrast, have long been believed to be relatively inflexible regarding both production and function. In this paper, we break new ground by providing evidence for vocal functional flexibility in one of the first systematic studies of early chimpanzee vocal production and function. This finding implies the developmental foundations for language are rooted in our primate evolutionary heritage.Graphical abstract 
Figure 1. Stacked bar chart showing the proportion of calls produced across positive, neutral, and negative affective states for each call type based on the total number of events
Dashed lines indicate expected proportions assuming a random distribution across affective states. Raw number of calls per category are overlaid on the bars.
Figure 2. Stacked bar chart showing the contingency between vocal affect (positive vs. negative) and social partner responses (change vs. continue) for grunts
The dashed line indicates expected proportions assuming a random distribution of responses. Raw number of responses per category are overlaid on the bars.
Taylor, Derry; Gustafsson, Erik; Dezecache, Guillaume; Davila-Ross, Marina
Vocal functional flexibility in the grunts of young chimpanzees
iScience 26(10). doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107791
Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by Elsevier Inc. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
So, once again, it turns out that what creationists think they are citing in support of their superstition, is instead evidence of common origins and thus for evolution of humans and the classification of humans as a great ape of the Hominidae family which includes chimpanzees and gorillas.
And the casual refutation of creationism by science continues unabated…
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