Researchers taping calls of the putty-nosed monkey in the forests of Nigeria may have come a small step closer to understanding the origins of human language.
...
Language is a surprising faculty because it seems to pop up almost out of nowhere in the human lineage, instead of evolving in steady stages.
Researchers studying monkeys and apes have learned that they possess all the basic apparatus needed to make and analyze sounds. But the nonhuman primates did not seem to possess either of the two combinatorial features of language, those of combining discrete sounds into compound words, and of stringing words together under rules of syntax.
...
"Because there is no evidence that the calls are words or even wordlike, the connection to language is tenuous." he said.
Who knew? Here we thought he was a chimp...nope, he's a putty-nosed monkey, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
