Just Another Ape? by Helene Guldberg

Author:Helene Guldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanity, humans, animals, apes, human behaviour, human nature, culture, cognition, animal learning, tool use, folk psychology, perception, beliefs, language, communication, evolution, consciousness
ISBN: 9781845407445
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

5. Language and Communication

‘Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1803–1882).

Talking to the New York Times, the world renowned primatologist, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, claimed:

[Apes in the wild] do make all kinds of ape noises. And I believe they use them to communicate with one another. Now, the apes may not always elect to talk about the same things we do. They might not have a translation for every word in our vocabulary to theirs. But from what I’ve seen, I believe they are communicating very complex things (Dreifus, 1998).

There is no doubt that apes and other animals are able to communicate with each other in the wild – whether through courtship rituals, dominance and territorial displays, or food and alarm calls. For instance, dogs bare their teeth and growl to signal to other animals to leave their territory. Cats try to make themselves look bigger and more menacing by puffing out the hair on their tails to signal to other animals not to oppose them. Subordinate chimpanzees use grunts directed to dominant chimpanzees to signal appeasement or submission. However, the evidence for any animal being able to communicate ‘very complex things’ is non-existent.

Despite animals being incapable of communicating anything remotely complex, the means by which some species communicate with each other can appear extremely elaborate. Take the honey bee. Through its ‘waggle-dance’ it is able to communicate to its hive-mates in which direction and how far they must fly to find water, pollen or nectar. The bee indicates the direction of the food source through the angle from the sun, and the distance to the food source through the duration of the waggle.

Neither the honey bees waggle-dance nor primates cries, whoops and gestures are comparable with human language. Robbins Burling, professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Michigan, writes in The Talking Ape: How language evolved :

Like most other mammals, primates communicate with their voices as well as by movements and gestures. With their cries, whoops and chatter they coordinate their activities, call for help, show their anger, make threats, and even warn one another of danger. Since most human languages are also produced with the voice, and since language is also used to coordinate activites, call for help, and show emotions, hardly anyone can resist searching among primates calls for the forerunners of human language (Burling, 2005: 16).

But although it may seem reasonable to ask how natural selection might have transformed these more primitive forms of communication into the kind of language that humans speak, such an investigation would be fruitless, Burling argues. He writes:

Language is organised in such utterly different ways from primate or mammalian calls and it conveys such utterly different kinds of meanings, that I find it impossible to imagine a realistic sequence by which natural or sexual selection could have converted a call system into a language. Human beings, moreover still have a fine set of primate calls that remains quite separate from language. Primate calls have

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