Firstly just a quick apology for the delay in posts recently; I have been busy with exams over the past few weeks, so hopefully things will return to normal now.
A orangutan called Tilda which resides in a zoo in Germany produces human like vocalizations to grab the attention of her keepers. Tilda was born in Borneo over 50 years ago and was unfortunately taken from the wild at around 2 years of age by poachers and even though it is not genuinely known what happened to her during this period of captivity, it is believed she was trained and used for human entertainment due, to her clapping, whistling and human sounds which may have been learnt by copying them from humans around her.
In order to understand the motivation behind her calls, a team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam took recordings of her behavior; this led them to discover that she had two distinct types of vocalization which they termed clicks and faux-speech which had never been documented in orangutans before but showed similarities to human speech.
Tilda makes clicking sounds via clicking her tongue similar, to how we produce consonant sounds; for faux-speech she makes grumbling sounds similar to human vowels. Orangutans have been known to make sounds such as raspberries alongside voiced calls but none have shown rapid lip movements which produce these clicks and faux speech.
The reason Tilda makes these sounds becomes obvious when her keepers are present, she uses these calls to acquire the keeper's attention to a food source that she wants, gesturing to the object with either her finger or lip whilst making the sounds.
These findings are important to science as they may help to provide scientists with a insight into how human speech evolved and developed, with Tilda's calls hinting that the common ancestor of great apes was able to learn and produce human like calls.
As always feel free to share you thoughts on this subject via the comment box below and thanks for reading :)
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