If you live in a foreign country, it helps to learn the local lingo. And this holds just as true for apes as it does for humans, scienti...
If you live in a foreign country, it helps to learn the local lingo.
And this holds just as true for apes as it does for humans, scientists claim.
Chimpanzees
that had lived for years in a Dutch safari park adopted a ‘Scottish
accent’ after they moved to a new home in an Edinburgh Zoo alongside
nine local chimps, the researchers argue.
The Dutch apes would make high pitched grunts when they saw apples.
The local Edinburgh chimps, by contrast, made a distinctive, lower-pitched grunt.
It's
evidence, the scientists from the universities of York, Zurich and St
Andrews said, that apes have ‘accents’ that vary from place to place –
just like us.
It
took several years for the expat apes to pick up the local dialect,
because the two groups did not mix much when they were first introduced
in 2010.
Dr
Katie Slocombe, of the University of York said: ‘They weren't spending
much quality time together and there weren't many friendships. So they
didn’t have any motivation to change their calling.’
But after three years, the two groups buried their initial distrust of each other and got on famously.
In
what is billed as a breakthrough in the study of language, the
scientists said the Dutch apes adopted the same style of grunting as
that of their hosts.
CHIMPANZEES CAN TELL RIGHT FROM WRONG
They
are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, capable of using tools
and solving problems much like their human cousins, but it appears
chimpanzees also share our sense of morality too.
A
new study of the apes reacting to an infant chimp being killed by
another group has shown the animals have a strong sense of right and
wrong.
The researchers found chimpanzees reacted to videos showing the violent scenes in a similar way to humans.
The
researchers, whose study is published in the journal Human Nature,
filmed 17 adult chimpanzees from two different zoos in Switzerland as
they watched video clips.
The
clips showed chimps either performing a neutral activity such as
walking or cracking nuts, aggressive adult chimps, a small colobus
monkey being hunted and killed by chimps and an infant chimpanzee being
killed by its own kind.
The
zoo animals looked up to four times longer at the infanticide scenes
than any of the other video clips, responding not just to the infant
screams but also to the scenes as a whole.
The
findings suggest that chimpanzees can distinguish between aggression
against infants compared to other violent forms of behaviour.
However,
the researchers also found while the chimps watched the infanticide
scenes for longer, there was only limited evidence they became agitated
or reacted to them.
Dr
Rudolf von Rohr said this perhaps suggest while chimpanzees can
distinguish between right and wrong they will only respond emotionally
to digressions within their own social group.
She
said: 'We propose that chimpanzees as uninvolved bystanders may detect
norm violations but may restrict emotional reactions to such situations
to in-group contexts.'
By 2013, Dr Slocombe said: ‘The Dutch chimps had actually adopted the Edinburgh call for apples.’
She
added: ‘If you tend to mimic someone's accent, they tend to get on
better with you and they like you more. So it could be something similar
to that, that we're seeing in the chimps.’
But the charming idea that there are regional variations in chimpanzee language has not been met with universal acceptance.
A rival band of researchers claim that the idea Scottish chimps have accents is making a monkey of us.
Scientists
from the German Primate Centre in Göttingen, the University of Kent,
and New York University (NYU) think the Dutch apes were simply getting
excited at meeting some new friends.
James
Higham, an assistant professor at NYU said the findings are
‘fundamentally a misrepresentation of the what the data actually show.’
He
said in a paper published in Current Biology that the original authors
did not factor in ‘arousal’ and that the Dutch chimps were simply more
excited.
Julia
Fischer, of the German Primate Centre added: ‘The Dutch chimpanzees may
have given slightly different calls to the Edinburgh chimps, and then
changed their calls, due simply to differences in their original feeding
environments and diet, and then the subsequent changes in these
following their move to Edinburgh.’
The
authors add that when it comes to a Dutch chimp accent and a Scottish
chimp accent the differences ‘are not terribly distinct’.
They say that in effect, one chimp grunt is much like another.
Brandon
Wheeler, of the University of Kent said: ‘Closer inspection of the data
reveals that both groups largely overlapped in the range of calls they
were originally giving in response to apples, with only a few calls of
the Dutch chimpanzees outside the range of the calls given by the
Edinburgh chimpanzees.
‘There
is some statistically significant but biologically weak change of the
calls over time following the move of the Dutch chimpanzees to
Edinburgh, but such social modulation is a well-known phenomenon in
animal vocalizations that has been found in most primate calls-and even
in the calls of goats.’
Professor
Higham added: ‘This process bears little resemblance to chimpanzees
'vocally learning' a different call for the same object.’
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