Monkeys Recognize Poor Grammar

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090708-monkey-grammar.html
Matt Kaplanfor National Geographic News
July 8, 2009
Monkeys can form sentences and speak in accents—and now a new study shows that our genetic relatives can also recognize poor grammar.
"We were really curious whether monkeys could even detect the common trend found in human language to add sounds to word edges, like adding 'ed' in English to create the past tense," said lead study author Ansgar Endress, a linguist at Harvard University.

Previous research in cotton-top tamarins had shown that the animals can understand basic grammar, for instance, identifying which words logically follow other words in a sentence.
But that same study, published in the journal Science in 2004, found that monkeys did not understand complex grammar, such as when words in a sentence depend on each other but are separated.
While that study suggested monkeys were deaf to complex communication, the new research shows that tamarins can grasp at least one advanced concept: prefixes and suffixes.
Wordplay
For their study, Endress and colleagues played recordings of made-up English words to a population of captive cotton-top tamarins for roughly 30 minutes a day.
Half of the tamarins were exposed to words with a varied stem but a constant suffix (such as bi-shoy, mo-shoy, and lu-shoy). The other half were exposed to a constant prefix followed by a varied stem (such as shoy-bi, shoy-mo, and shoy-lu).
The following day, individual tamarins were brought into an observation enclosure equipped with an audio speaker and video-recording equipment to capture their behavior. These tamarins were then exposed to more words.
Many of the words followed the same language rules that the tamarins had heard the day before, with half hearing "shoy" as a suffix and half hearing it as a prefix.
However, every once in a while, the researchers would play a recording of an "incorrect" word. For instance, the speaker would broadcast "shoy" as a suffix when it had previously been presented as a prefix, or vice versa.
Mental Machinery
Other biologists who were not aware of the research question were asked to watch and note every time the small mammals turned their heads toward the speaker.
When tamarins were exposed to words that "broke" the rules they had learned, they looked toward the speaker in a startled manner, observers noted.
The finding is dramatic, Endress explained, because it reveals that our distant cousins seem to have the mental machinery to identify verbal structures like suffixes and prefixes.
The research will appear this week in the journal Biology Letters.

"Human"-Faced Missing Link Found in Spain?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090610-missing-link-human-face.html

James Owen for National Geographic News
June 10, 2009
Move over Ida—you're last month's news. There's a new (purported) "missing link" in town.
An 11.9-million-year-old fossil ape species with an unusually flat, "surprisingly human" face has been found in Spain. The discovery suggests humans' ape ancestors split from primitive apes in Europe, not Africa—the so-called cradle of humanity—a new study says.

The species, Anoiapithecus brevirostris, may also represent the last known common ancestor of humans and living great apes—including orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees—researchers say.
"With this fossil, our opinion is that the origin of our family very probably took place in the Mediterranean region," said study leader Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona.
"Surprisingly Human"
Unearthed at a fossil-rich site near Barcelona in 2004, the fragmented skull remains suggest a species with human-like facial features, Moyà-Solà said.
But a familiar face in and of itself doesn't mean the fossil "has any special specific relationship with modern hominds"—humans and the great apes—the paleontologist added.
Rather, the human-like face is evidence of great diversity among ape species in the Mediterranean region 12 million years ago, he said.
Missing Link?
Resembling both primitive ape species and our early ancestors, Anoiapithecus could be called a missing link.
The ape's wide nose and long palate, for example, resemble those of the ancient apes from which great apes and humans arose, the study says.
But Anoiapithecus' thickly enameled teeth and robust jaw are like those of primitive Kenyapithecus fossil apes, which lived in both Africa and Europe, according to the team.
Kenyapithecus species have been proposed as common ancestors of humans and great apes.
Until now, however, there hasn't been a fossil linking Kenyapithecus to later apes thought to have evolved into more direct human ancestors, according to the study, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Spanish ape suggests this key evolutionary transition occurred after Kenyapithecus arrived in Europe from Africa some 15 million years ago—likely crossing over before the Mediterranean Sea formed, separating Africa from Europe—Moyà-Solà said.
"The 'folks' that migrated from Africa to the Mediterranean area were in fact completely primitive, without the [hominid] features that identify the members of our family," he said.
"The ancestors of gorillas, chimps, and humans then went back to Africa close to some nine million years ago."
There, they would give rise to the first humans, the thinking goes.
European Interlude
The new study isn't the first to hint at a European origin for hominids.
A similar theory has been advanced, for instance, based on 10- to 13-million-year-old fossils of the chimplike Dryopithecus group from France, Hungary, and Spain.
Anthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto believes the evolution of African apes can be traced to Dryopithecus species that had migrated from Africa to Europe during the pre-Mediterranean Sea period.
"The new Spanish fossils do indeed support that hypothesis," said Begun, who was not involved in the new study and whose work has been partially funded by the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
However Begun "does not see any compelling evidence" linking Kenyapithecus with the newfound Spanish species.
"Frankly, [the new species] does not look like Kenyapithecus to me," he added.
Moyà-Solà, the study leader, doesn't rule out the possibility that each of the great ape species evolved independently from different Kenyapithecus species.
And it's possible that Africa could yet yield a species that, like the new Spanish ape, bridges the gap between early human ancestors and more primitive apes, he admitted.
"It's impossible to test our hypothesis [as of yet], because the fossil record in Africa from this period is very poor," Moyà-Solà said. "We need more and better fossils from Africa."
To that end, he said, the team's next major scientific stop will be somewhere south of the Mediterranean.



Do you think it's a coincidence that a Medeteranian diet is so healthy for us (assuming this is a missing link)? It makes sense to me that if we started our branching out in that area that a diet of foods from that area would be what we were designed to eat, and is now found to be a very healthy diet for us.

Apes Laugh, Tickle Study Finds

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090604-apes-laugh-tickle-chimps-gorillas.html

Apes Laugh, Tickle Study Finds
Brian Handwerk for National Geographic News
June 4, 2009

What happens if you tickle a gorilla? According to a new study, the ape laughs—which would mean we're not the only animals born with funny bones.

By tickling young gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, researchers say they learned that all great apes laugh.
Their findings suggest we inherited our own ability to laugh from the last common ancestor from which humans and great apes evolved, which lived 10 to 16 million years ago.
Primatologist and psychologist Marina Davila Ross of the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth led a team that tickled the necks, feet, palms, and armpits of infant and juvenile apes as well as human babies. The team recorded more than 800 of the resulting giggles and guffaws.
(go to the link to hear laughter recordings)

Mapping the audible similarities and differences in laughs across the five species, the researchers created an acoustic family tree of human and great ape laughter.
The tree, they found, closely matched the standard genetics-based evolutionary tree of primates.
"So we concluded that these vocalizations all share the same common ancestry," Davila Ross explained.
But even the most casual listener can tell a human laugh from an ape laugh. Davila Ross points out that human laughter has distinct differences from ape laughter, most likely because humans have evolved much more rapidly than apes during the past five million years.
And at least one great mystery remains: What purpose does ape laughter serve?
"I'm very keen," Davila Ross said, "on learning how laughter is being used among great apes as compared to humans."
Is It Really Laughter?
It's previously been argued that chimps chuckle, but their method—"laughing" on both the exhale and inhale—had been deemed too different from the human, exhale-only laugh.
The tickle study, however, found evidence that most ape laughter, especially among gorillas and bonobos, shares key traits with human laughter.
Like humans, for example, gorillas and bonobos laughed only while exhaling—leading University of Wisconsin zoologist and psychologist Charles Snowdon, who was not involved in the study, to conclude that, "contrary to current views, the exhalation-only laughter is not uniquely human but is found in our ape ancestors."
Furthermore, gorillas' and bonobos' exhaling breaths during laughter lasted three to four times longer than during normal breathing.
This type of breath control, considered important in speech evolution, had also been thought to be unique to humans.
"Play Faces" to Chimp Chuckles?
Convinced by what he calls an "admirable" study, primatologist Frans de Waal said from now on he'd use "laughter" to describe what scientists have traditionally called a chimp's play face.
The combination of common facial expressions, breathing patterns, and sounds has led de Waal to the conclusion that our laughter has prehistoric, ape-based origins.
What's more, "the primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh," added de Waal, who was not involved in the tickle study.
"Tickling and wrestling are the situations in which primates laugh—and I use the term 'laugh' now advisedly, because the evidence from this study is very strong that their display is evolutionarily related to the human laugh."
Next Up: Rat Laughter?
Primates have apparently packed a lot of laughter into the last 10 to 16 million years, but there's a chance the chuckle originated even earlier: Tickle-induced "laughter" has also been reported in rats.
The idea remains controversial, but it could suggest that our funny bone evolved much closer to the trunk of mammals' evolutionary tree.

SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
University of Portsmouth: Marina Davila Ross
Emory University: Frans B.M. de Waal
University of Wisconsin: Charles Snowdon

Close Social Ties Make Baboons Better Mothers, Study Finds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610091429.htm
ScienceDaily (June 11, 2009) — Baboons whose mothers have strong relationships with other females are much more likely to survive to adulthood than baboons reared by less social mothers, according to a new study by researchers at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions.

"If you're a baboon, the strength of your mother's relationship with other females is the best predictor of whether you'll live to have children yourself," said Joan Silk, the study's lead author and a UCLA professor of anthropology. "The study adds to mounting evidence of the biological benefits of close relationships among females."
The findings are significant because "survivorship to reproduction is the gold standard in evolutionary biology," said co-author Dorothy Cheney, a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Females who raise offspring to a reproductive age are more likely see their genes pass along, so these findings demonstrate an evolutionary advantage to strong relationships with other females. In evolutionary terms, social moms are the fittest moms — at least when it comes to baboons."
The study appears online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a peer-reviewed journal published by the national academy of science of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
Silk, Cheney and seven other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and the University of St. Andrews in Kenya analyzed 17 years worth of records on more than 66 adult female baboons in the Moremi Game Reserve, a 2,000-square-mile national park in Botswana that teems with wildlife.
Collected on the ground by primatologists who tracked the baboons six days a week, 12 months a year, the records reflected the sex and survival rates of baboon offspring, as well as telling details of the mothers' social lives, including their ranking within the group, as measured by the direction of approach/retreat interactions, and the amount of social interactions they had with each of the group's other females.
In addition to showing how often one animal approached another, the records of social interactions included details of grooming, which is known to be the primary form of social interaction in Old World monkeys. The researchers noted how much time — frequency and duration — the females spent grooming each other and how often they solicited grooming from other females.
Of all the factors studied, the strength of a mother's social bonds with another female had the most significant effect on the survival rates of offspring. A mother's dominance rank proved to have no affect on the survival rate of her offspring.
"We really expected dominance status to be more influential than it proved to be," Silk said.
Offspring from the most social mothers turned out to be about one-and-a-half times more likely to survive to adulthood than offspring from the least social mothers.
The strongest social bonds were measured between mothers and adult daughters, followed by sisters and all other potential relationships, including aunts, nieces, cousins and baboons with no familial ties. Bonds between mothers and adult daughters proved to be three times stronger than those between sisters and 10 times stronger than relationships with other females.
"What really matter to these girls are mother-daughter bonds," Silk said. "They're really strong, and they last forever. If your mom is alive, she's one of your top partners, always. But more importantly, it's the strength of these bonds, because females whose bonds with their mothers and daughters were strong had higher offspring survival than females whose bonds with these relatives were weak."
Silk's past research with Jeanne Altmann, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and Susan C. Alberts, a professor of biology at Duke University, on baboons in the Amboseli Basin of Kenya had found a higher survival rate for baboons with social mothers, but the research only tracked offspring through the first year of life.
For the new study, researchers followed offspring from 1 year of age through sexual maturity — roughly 5 years of age. The new study also differs from past baboon research by focusing on the strength and duration of relationships between pairs of females rather than on the amount of social interactions in general.
"The benefit comes not from being wildly social — it's about having close social bonds," said Cheney, who runs the Moremi baboon-tracking project with University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Robert M. Seyfarth.
"These females form strong relationships with particular partners," Silk said. "They don't treat everyone the same. They spend a lot more time with — and a lot more time grooming — some females than others, and these relationships tend to be very long-lasting."
Additional research is needed to determine how the female bonds improve infant survival, but it may have to do with such stress hormones as cortisol, Silk said. Research has shown that prolonged elevations of stress hormones in primates can lead to cardiovascular disease and other serious health problems. Research has also shown that grooming tends to lower these stress hormones in baboons.
"Our research suggests that somehow there is a link between the kind of social relationships you form and the natural, normal stresses that occur in everyday life, and that seems to have — at least in baboons — a long-term effect on reproductive success," Silk said.
Said to share 92 percent of their DNA with humans, baboons are close relatives of humans. Baboons and humans last shared a common ancestor about 18 million years ago. The new findings on social interactions among mothers parallel recent research that has shown health benefits for humans who enjoy particularly close social networks.
"Our findings suggest benefits from forming close relationships are built into us from a long way back," Silk said.
The research received funding from the National Geographic Foundation, the Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Orangutans Communicate As If They Were Playing Charades

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070802091437.htm

ScienceDaily (Aug. 2, 2007) — When using gestures to get their points across, orangutans rely on the same basic strategy that humans follow when playing the popular game and intentionally modify or repeat hand (or other) signals based on the success or failure of their first attempt.

Professor Richard Byrne of the School of Psychology said, "We were surprised that the orangutans' responses so clearly signaled their assessment of the audience's comprehension. Looking at the tapes of the animal's responses, you can easily work out whether the orangutan thinks it has been fully, partially, or not understood, without seeing what went before."
"This means that, in effect, they are passing information back to the audience about how well they are doing in understanding them, hence our 'charades' analogy. In playing the game, you want primarily to convey your meaning non-verbally - as does the orangutan - but secondarily to help the team get your meaning by giving them hints as to how well they are doing."
To find out whether orangutans intentionally communicate with people through gestures - a skill earlier attributed to chimpanzees - PhD student Erica Cartmill and Professor Byrne presented six orangutans in Jersey and Twycross Zoos with situations in which one tempting and one not-so-tempting food item had to be reached with human help.

But to test the orangutans' strategy, there was a catch. Rather than play along all the time, the experimenter sometimes purposefully misunderstood the orangutan's requests, providing them with only half of the delicious treat in some cases and, in others, handing over the less pleasant alternative instead.
When the person they were trying to communicate with did not meet orangutans' aims, they persisted with further attempts, the researchers reported. When partially understood, the animals narrowed down their range of signals, focusing on gestures already used and repeating them frequently. In contrast, when completely misunderstood, orangutans elaborated their range of gestures, avoiding repetition of 'failed' signals.
"The response showed that the orangutan had intended a particular result, anticipated getting it, and kept trying until it got the result," Cartmill said. "The orangutans made a clear distinction between total misunderstanding, when they tended to give up on the signals they'd used already, and use new, but equivalent, ones to get the idea across, and partial misunderstanding, when they tended to repeat the signals that had already partially worked, keeping at it with vigor. The result was that understanding could be achieved more quickly."
The orangutans' charades-like strategy is one way to construct shared meaning from learned or ritualised signals in the absence of language, the researchers concluded. Further investigation of communication among apes may therefore provide insight into the pre-linguistic devices that helped construct the very earliest forms of hominid language.
The findings are published in Current Biology (2 August 2007).

Ape Gestures Offer Clues To The Evolution Of Human Communication

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070430181209.htm

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2007) — Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have found bonobos and chimpanzees use manual gestures of their hands, feet and limbs more flexibly than they do facial expressions and vocalizations, further supporting the evolution of human language began with gestures as the gestural origin hypothesis of language suggests. This study appears in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Working with two groups of bonobos (13 animals) and two groups of chimpanzees (34 animals), Yerkes researchers Amy Pollick, PhD, and Frans de Waal, PhD, distinguished 31 manual gestures and 18 facial/vocal signals. They found both species used facial/vocal signals similarly, but the same did not hold true for the manual gestures. Rather, the researchers found both within and between species the manual gestures were less closely tied to a particular emotion and, thereby, serve a more adaptable function. For example, a single gesture may communicate an entirely different message depending upon the social context in which it is used.
"A chimpanzee may stretch out an open hand to another as a signal for support, whereas the same gesture toward a possessor of food signals a desire to share," said Pollick. "A scream, however, is a typical response for victims of intimidation, threat or attack. This is so for both bonobos and chimpanzees, and suggests the vocalization is relatively invariant," Pollick continued.
By studying similar types of communication in closely related species, researchers are able to determine shared ancestry. We know gestures are evolutionarily younger than facial expressions and vocalizations, as shown by their presence in apes and humans but not in monkeys. "A gesture that occurs in bonobos and chimpanzees as well as humans likely was present in the last common ancestor," said Pollick. "A good example of a shared gesture is the open-hand begging gesture, used by both apes and humans. This gesture can be used for food, if there is food around, but it also can be used to beg for help, for support, for money and so on. It's meaning is context-dependent," added de Waal.

Looking for further distinctions between species, the researchers found bonobos use gestures more flexibly than do chimpanzees. "Different groups of bonobos used gestures in specific contexts less consistently than did different groups of chimpanzees," said Pollick. The researcher's findings also suggest bonobos and chimpanzees engage in multi-modal communication, combining their gestures with facial expressions and vocalizations to communicate a message. "While chimpanzees produce more of these combinations, bonobos respond to them more often. This finding suggests the bonobo is a better model of symbolic communication in our early ancestors," concluded Pollick.

New Hominid 12 Million Years Old Found In Spain, With 'Modern' Facial Features

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090602083729.htm
ScienceDaily (June 2, 2009) — Researchers have discovered a fossilized face and jaw from a previously unknown hominoid primate genus in Spain dating to the Middle Miocene era, roughly 12 million years ago. Nicknamed "Lluc," the male bears a strikingly "modern" facial appearance with a flat face, rather than a protruding one. The finding sheds important new light on the evolutionary development of hominids, including orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.
In a study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Salvador Moyà-Solà, director of the Institut Català de Paleontologia (ICP) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and colleagues present evidence for the new genus and species, dubbed Anoiapithecus brevirostris. The scientific name is derived from the region where the fossil was found (l’Anoia) and also from its "modern" facial morphology, characterized by a very short face.
The research team at the ICP also includes collaborator David M. Alba, predoctoral researcher Sergio Almécija, postdoctoral researcher Isaac Casanovas, researcher Meike Köhler, postdoctoral researcher Soledad De Esteban, collaborator Josep M. Robles, curator Jordi Galindo, and predoctoral researcher Josep Fortuny.
Their findings are based on a partial cranium that preserves most of the face and the associated mandible. The cranium was unearthed in 2004 in the fossil-rich area of Abocador de Can Mata (els Hostalets de Pierola, l’Anoia, Barcelona), where remains of other fossilized hominid species have been found. Preparing the fossil for study was a complicated process, due to the fragility of the remains. But once the material was available for analysis, the results were surprising: The specimen (IPS43000) combined a set of features that, until now, had never been found in the fossil record.
Anoiapithecus displays a very modern facial morphology, with a muzzle prognathism (i.e., protrusion of the jaw) so reduced that, within the family Hominidae, scientists can only find comparable values within the genus Homo, whereas the remaining great apes are notoriously more prognathic (i.e., having jaws that project forward markedly). The extraordinary resemblance does not indicate that Anoiapithecus has any relationship with Homo, the researchers note. However, the similarity might be a case of evolutionary convergence, where two species evolving separately share common features.
Lluc's discovery may also hold an important clue to the geographical origin of the hominid family. Some scientists have suspected that a group of primitive hominoids known as kenyapithecines (recorded from the Middle Miocene of Africa and Eurasia) might have been the ancestral group that all hominids came from. The detailed morphological study of the cranial remains of Lluc showed that, together with the modern anatomical features of hominids (e.g., nasal aperture wide at the base, high zygomatic rood, deep palate), it displays a set of primitive features, such as thick dental enamel, teeth with globulous cusps, very robust mandible and very procumbent premaxilla. These features characterize a group of primitive hominoids from the African Middle Miocene, known as afropithecids.
Interestingly, in addition to having a mixture of hominid and primitive afropithecid features, Lluc displays other characteristics, such as a very anterior position of the zygomatic, a very strong mandibular torus and, especially, a very reduced maxillary sinus. These are features shared with kenyapithecines believed to have dispersed outside the African continent and colonized the Mediterranean region, by about 15 million years ago.
In other words, the researchers speculate, hominids might have originally radiated in Eurasia from kenyapithecine ancestors of African origin. Later on, the ancestors of African great apes and humans would have dispersed again into Africa -- the so-called "into Africa" theory, which remains controversial. However, the authors do not completely rule out the possibility that pongines (orangutans and related forms) and hominines (African apes and humans) separately evolved in Eurasia and Africa, respectively, from different kenyapithecine ancestors.
The project at els Hostalets de Pierola is continuing and, the researchers anticipate, more fossil remains will be found in the future that will provide key information to test their hypotheses.