Monday, January 2, 2017

Orangutan Does What No Chimp Has Ever Done

Dynamic, Interactive Vocal Fold Control

In a study published last year an adolescent male orangutan achieved a milestone in vocal control never before performed by any great ape, including chimpanzees. As the study reported:

These results confirm the capacity of orang-utans to learn and acquire new calls into their individual repertoires, both in the form of voiceless consonant-like calls and voiced vowel-like calls.

This has “never been demonstrated directly in a non-human primate.” That includes chimpanzees.

Perhaps a chimp will someday exhibit the same skill, but that has yet to be seen. We suspect there is a reason why this finding involved an orangutan. It is another example of their relatively advanced abilities.

3 comments:

  1. This YEC welcomes any primate using its vocal cords.
    This because i say they all could talk right now. they only are too dumb or rather do not use their memory to combine sounds for important meanings.
    They should be able to memorize new sounds.
    Yet they would not educate their iffspring.
    They don't need many sounds and are too dumb.
    Language is about intelligent thoughts and the memory to use sounds to express same thoughts.

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  2. Many new questions in regard to almost every principle mentioned by Darwin have arisen. For example, it is asked whether the appearance of a new organ or for that matter any other organic change, always results from the use of that organ and the attempt to adapt it to one's environment or it may be due to mutation or any other cause?


    The acquired qualities are hereditable as a principle or genetic investigations have rejected this theory?

    The organic changes, whatever may be their cause, are always aimed at survival and evolution or sometimes they may be due to the inconsistency with the environmental conditions and may culminate in death and extinction?

    Natural selection is or is not like artificial selection which leads the existing generation to evolution?

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  3. It is of some importance that the sounds were produced with ingressive airflow. Human egressive sounds seem to be unique.

    ReplyDelete