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Why Can't Monkeys Talk Like Us? Their Vocal Tract Might Not Be the Problem.

posted by martyb on Tuesday December 13 2016, @02:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the Hey!-Hey!-We're-the-Monkees! dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

A talking monkey seems like a thing of science-fiction, cartoons, and goofy advertisements. But new research suggests monkey speech may be closer to reality than commonly thought.

Macaques actually have vocal anatomy capable of human-like speech, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. 

"This suggests that what makes people unique among primates is our ability to control the vocal apparatus, not the apparatus itself," Thore Jon Bergman, an evolutionary biopsychologist at the University of Michigan who was not part of the research, writes in an email to The Christian Science Monitor.

Talking monkeys is the stuff of nightmares.

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  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Gaaark on Tuesday December 13 2016, @02:53PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday December 13 2016, @02:53PM (#440794) Journal

    maybe they ARE saying all they need to say, and we just can't understand them because we don't have a gorgeous Uhura available to translate for us, standing by in her underwear!

    MORE UHURA'S IN THEIR UNDERWEAR!!!!

    --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @04:41PM (#440839)

    Fun fact: "Hure" is the German word for whore. In German, her outfit in combination with the name leaves a lot to imagination.