2399. The Ability to Use Language Might Have Its Origin in the Great Apes

By Nicholas St. Fuller, The New York Times, July 29, 2016

Rocky

Orangutan hear, orangutan do.

Researchers at the Indianapolis Zoo observed an orangutan mimic the pitch and tone of human sounds, for the first time. The finding, which was published Wednesday, provides insight into the evolutionary origin of human speech, the team said.

“It really redefines for us what we know about the capabilities of orangutans,” said Rob Shumaker, director of the zoo and an author on the paper. “What we have to consider now is the possibility that the origins of spoken language are not exclusively human, and that they may have come from great apes.”

Rocky, an 11-year-old orangutan at the zoo, has a special ability. He can make sounds using his vocal folds, or voice box, that resemble the vowel “A,” and sound like “Ah.” The noises, or “wookies” as the researchers called them, are variations of the same vocalization.

Sometimes the great ape would say high-pitched “wookies” and sometimes he would say his “Ahs” in a lower pitch.

The researchers note that the sounds are specific to Rocky and ones that he used everyday. No other orangutan, captive or wild, made these noises. Rocky, who had never lived in the rain forest, apparently learned the skill during his time as an entertainment orangutan before coming to the zoo. He was at one point the most seen orangutan in movies and commercials, according to the zoo.

The researchers said that Rocky’s grunts show that great apes have the capacity to learn to control their muscles to deliberately alter their sounds in a “conversational” manner. The findings, which were published in the journal Scientific Reports, challenge the notion that orangutans — an endangered species that shares about 97 percent of it DNA with humans — make noises simply in response to something, sort of like how you might scream when you place your hand on a hot stove.

“Orangutans can clearly and carefully control their vocalizations, and they can do it in real-time interacting with another individual,” said Dr. Schumaker. “They can control the volume and the frequency and even the duration.”

To show the extent of Rocky’s vocal abilities, the researchers had Dr. Madeleine Hardus, an independent researcher who works with the zoo, hold a conversation with the orangutan entirely in “wookies.” She would say “Ah” at a certain tone and Rocky would mimic that sound for a treat.

“We presented him a random sequence of 500 either low or high ‘wookies’ produced by the human,” Adriano Lameira, a primatologist at Durham University in Britain, and lead author of the study said. The goal was to have Rocky repeat the sound in the same tone and frequency as the lady’s noise. They used 500 variants of “Ahs” to show that his responses were not random guesses.

The team recorded the tests and then used computer software to see how closely the frequency, pitch, tone and duration of Rocky’s “Ahs” matched Dr. Hardus’s “Ahs.”

“Every time she lowered her voice or raised her voice frequency, Rocky matched this up,” Dr. Lameira said. “And he nailed it. He was impressively good at it.”

To understand what Rocky did, imagine if you meowed at your cat and it was able to mimic you completely. You start out in a high-pitch voice and then your cat surprises you by responding with the same high-pitch call. And then when you drop into a Barry White voice, your cat responds with its own seductively deep meow to match.

Other scientists who have studied animal behavior and watched Rocky’s vocalizations were impressed.

“They say a picture is worth a thousand words — this video is worth the whole paper,” said Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who was not involved in the study. “It was really clear how the orangutan was matching the vocalizations of the human.”

He added that the finding presents an important step forward in understanding the evolution of human vocal behavior.

“It provides an evolutionary explanation for what we take to be uniquely human behavior, and shows that we’re not that unique in this capacity.”

1851. Newly Discovered Stone Tools Are 3.3 Million Years Old

By John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, May 20, 2015

A stone tool recovered in West Turkana, Kenya, which dates to 3.3 million years ago. Photo: MPK-WTAP

One morning in July 2011, while exploring arid badlands near the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a team of archaeologists took a wrong turn and made a big discovery about early human technology: Our hominin ancestors were making stone tools 3.3 million years ago, some 700,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The findings promise to extend knowledge of the first toolmakers even deeper in time, probably before the emergence of the genus Homo, once considered the first to gain an evolutionary edge through stone technology.

“Immediately, I knew that we had found something very special,” said Sonia Harmand, a research associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York, in a telephone interview from Nairobi, Kenya.

Within an hour, Dr. Harmand and Jason E. Lewis, co-leaders of the project, traced the source of the artifacts scattered in a dry riverbed to datable volcanic sediments at the top of a nearby hill. The stones showed that at least some ancient hominins — the group that includes humans and their extinct ancestors — had started intentionally knapping stones, breaking off pieces with quick, hard strikes from another stone to make sharp tools sooner than other findings suggested.

After further field research and laboratory analysis, the findings at the site known as Lomekwi 3 were described Wednesday in the journal Nature.

What the sharp blades were used for is not yet known. Nor is the identity of the toolmakers.

No bone fossils have been found at the discovery site. But in all likelihood, Dr. Harmand and Dr. Lewis said, the tools were produced by a more primitive member of the human family well before the appearance of the genus Homo. The earliest known Homo specimen, announced more than two months ago, lived 2.8 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The earliest previous evidence of toolmaking, also from Ethiopia, was dated 2.6 million years ago.

“These tools shed light on an unexpected and previously unknown period of hominin behavior, and can tell us a lot about cognitive development in our ancestors that we can’t understand from fossils alone,” said Dr. Harmand, who is also affiliated with France’s National Center for Scientific Research. “Our finding disproved the longstanding assumption that Homo habilis was the first toolmaker.”

Alison Brooks, an anthropology professor at George Washington University and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution, who was independent of the discovery team, pronounced the finding “truly pathbreaking.” She said it “reaffirms the argument that the repeated and competent manufacture of useful sharp edges, on which we came to depend, may have been a driving factor in the evolution of our genus, both anatomically and cognitively.”

In a sense, the deeper record of stone technology was no surprise to paleoanthropologists. Previous examples, especially the 2.5-million-year-old artifacts collected at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, were thought to be too well made to have been a recent innovation. How far back the evidence for this stone technology extends is anyone’s guess, the experts say.

In a commentary in the journal, Erella Hovers, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote that some form of toolmaking may have extended back to the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins, as much as seven million years ago.

Dr. Hovers and other scientists not involved in the new research said that the dating of the material appeared solid and that the objects were deliberately produced tools, not scraps of rock broken by accident or natural causes.

“Because the sediments in these layers are fine-grained, and a flake found by the authors could be fitted back onto the core from which it had been detached,” Dr. Hovers said, “it is unlikely that the tools accumulated through stream activity or that substantial disturbance of the sediments occurred after the tools had been discarded.”

Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College of the City University of New York and a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, noted that once in a generation, the age of humanity’s first known use of tools increases significantly. 

“Harmand’s find is the longest jump back in time,” he said, “nearly three quarters of a million years, to a period when the only known hominin fossils belong to Australopithecus,” the genus most famously represented by the “Lucy” skeleton and found throughout East Africa.

Another possibility is a hominin known as Kenyanthropus platyops, whose fossils were found in the region of Lake Turkana. But Dr. Delson cautioned that fossils of this genus are “poorly known and still questionably distinct” as a separate hominin entity.

Dr. Delson said the discovery of what Dr. Harmand and her colleagues are calling the Lomekwian industry raises several questions: namely, are these really tools, and what were these hominins, whoever they were, doing with implements far larger and heavier than the small and simple flakes and cores that characterized the more recent 2.6-million-year-old technologies?

Even now, researchers doubt that they have reached the earliest origins of stone tool technology. As Dr. Hovers said, “Why not dig deeper in time?” The Lomekwi 3 site, she added, “may not be the final — or rather, the first — word on the roots of human technology.”

Dr. Harmand and Dr. Lewis will return to Lake Turkana this summer to search for more clues to the identities of the toolmakers. “Now we have a better idea of what we should look for,” Dr. Harmand said.