Get the latest tech news
Bonobos' calls may be the closest thing to animal language we've seen
300 aspects of each call were cataloged, letting researchers estimate meaning.
Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich, discovered bonobos can combine these basic sounds into larger semantic structures. To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from distributional semantics, the methodology we’ve relied on in reconstructing long-lost languages like Etruscan or Rongorongo. Bonobos combined yelps and grunts into a trivial compositional structure meaning “let’s do what I do.” This was mostly used when the group was building night nests—platforms made high in the trees out of broken branches, sometimes lined with leaves.
Or read this on Hacker News
