This Orangutan Has Learned To Talk Like A Human

An orangutan called Rocky has amazed experts by producing sounds similar to words in a “conversational context”.

The breakthrough came as part of a game in which Rocky mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made vowel-like calls.

The researchers then compared Rocky’s sounds against a database of recordings of wild and captive orangutans and found that they were markedly different.

The conclusion they drew was that the eight-year-old ape is able to learn new sounds and control the action of his voice as humans do when they talk to each other.

And as a result, they believe that Rocky could be the key to understanding how human speech evolved.

Rocky: he’s got a lot to say for himself [PA]

Lead researcher Dr Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, said: “It’s not clear how spoken language evolved from the communication systems of the ancestral great apes.

"Instead of learning new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by arousal over which they have no control, but our research proves that orangutans have the potential capacity to control the action of their voices.

"This indicates that the voice control shown by humans could derive from an evolutionary ancestor with similar voice control capacities as those found in orangutans and in all great apes more generally.

"This opens up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans.”

The findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Scientific Reports.

A previous study also led by Dr Lameira when he was based at the University of Amsterdam found that a female orangutan called Tilda could make sounds that had the same rhythm and pace as human speech.

A gorilla named Koko, who now lives at the San Francisco zoo, was also taught to communicate using sign language.