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takyon writes:

Primates are talking, but are you listening?

For decades, scientists thought that most primates could not produce vowels, sounds fundamental to human speech. That's because nonhumans supposedly lacked the necessary vocal anatomy. But now, researchers report that Guinea baboons, monkeys that inhabit the forests and savanna of West Africa, make five vowellike sounds similar to those used by humans. The findings bolster a recent study showing that Japanese macaques are also anatomically capable of speech. Together, the work suggests that the basic elements of spoken language began to evolve much earlier than suspected, at least 25 million years ago.

"It perfectly complements our own results," says William Tecumseh Fitch, an evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Vienna and the lead author of the macaque study. "But they're looking at what baboons actually do," not a simulation as in his team's research, he adds. The discovery "provides additional evidence that scientists have underestimated the flexibility of the primate vocal tract."

That error stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the monkey larynx, says Joel Fagot, a primatologist at Aix-Marseille University in France and an author of the new study. "It was thought that in order to pronounce vowels, you had to have a low larynx [voice box], as humans do," he says. Because monkey larynxes are set much higher than our own, scientists thought this anatomical difference explained why primates could not utter vowels, which are "critical for language," Fagot says. "You can't have language without them." Yet human babies with high larynxes can also pronounce vowels, a phenomenon that perplexed Fagot and his colleagues.

Also at Scientific American and NYT.

Evidence of a Vocalic Proto-System in the Baboon (Papio papio) Suggests Pre-Hominin Speech Precursors (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169321) (DX)

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

Original Submission