PARIS: Scientists have discovered that when chimpanzee groups merge, their accents transform until they are all grunting in the same manner, writes The Telegraph.
The ability to modify vocalizations to fit in with social groups was believed to a trait only found in humans, until now.
“Our study shows that chimpanzee referential food calls are not fixed in their structure and that, when exposed to a new social group, chimpanzees can change their calls to sound more like their group mates,” Katie Slocombe of the University of York, said in a statement.
Chimpanzees have special grunts for particular types of foods, and other chimps in their group know exactly what these calls mean.
Scientists studied how the grunt for ‘apple’ changed over a three-year period when a group of chimps merged at Edinburgh Zoo.
They found that the high-pitched calls of one group converged with the low-pitch noise of the other group as they got to know each other better, until it was identical.
“We think it’s quite easy to hear how the two groups called in different ways for apples in 2010, and how by 2013 the Dutch individuals changed their grunts to sound more like Edinburgh individuals,” said Stuart Watson, also from the University of York.
According to scientists – the short evolutionary distance between humans and chimpanzees suggests that our most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees also shared an important “building block” of language.
