Origin of Language: Koko after 30 years (Origins)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 18, 2015, 13:40 (3383 days ago) @ xeno6696

It has taken lots of training:-http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/18/how-a-coughing-ape-is-changing-our-ideas-about-animals-humans-and-language/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_headlines-"Later, scientists would learn that the mouths, wind pipes and vocal chords of apes are fundamentally different than those of humans. Our tongues are more flexible, our lips more sophisticated, our lungs specially designed to control the strength of our breath. Beyond that, our brains are just better equipped to control those parts of our bodies. Our Broca's area — the part of the brain linked to language processing and speech — is much larger, and our neurons more significantly connected to our vocal tract.-"So researchers switched to sign language for their ape experiments, resigned to the idea that apes' bodies and brains just weren't designed for speech.-
"But those discoveries left researchers with an unexplained gap in the evolutionary history of language. Other kinds of more distantly related primates, like monkeys, are known to produce human-like “precursors” to speech: chitters, chortles, harmonic tones. And most humans in most environmental circumstances have developed spoken language, even without being explicitly taught.-****-" There's still some skepticism in the scientific community about that last point. Studies have challenged the idea that apes understand the meaning of their sign language communication the way humans do, or suggested that famous primates like Koko, who have lived their whole lives in the company of humans, aren't representative of their species"--?