Monkeys may make “comments”

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Arial" size="4">Monkeys may make “comments”</font></b> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Posted Sept. 1, 2004<br> World Science Staff</font><font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b><br> <br> Everyone knows apes and monkeys make noises – grunts, mating calls, threats, whatever. But few of us would call any of these sounds </b></font> <b><font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2">“comments.”</font></b> <font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b>Commenting, after all, is what humans do. It's a privilege that comes with our lofty language abilities. Or so we like to think.</b></font> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b>But some monkeys do appear to comment on what goes on around them,researchers have found.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b>Henrik Brumm and colleagues at the University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom, catalogued the sounds that barbary macaques made while watching their peers interacting. The researchers made the following observations.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b>First, many of the noises were made out of earshot of the interacting monkeys themselves, but within earshot of others. Second, these sounds were made especially often in response to situations that these macaques are known to consider interesting, such as ones involving newborns or involving conflict.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b>Third, it was possible to some extent to correlate the type of sound with the type of situation; for instance, conflict situations were associated with longer calls. All these facts suggest the monkeys, who were living in a semi-free situation in a fenced-in area of a park, were “commenting” to their peers about what they were seeing, the researchers write in the Aug. 14 online edition of the journal Primates.</b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF" size="2"><b>While the content of the “comments” is unclear, the calls could be interpreted as evaluations of the goings on, or simply as look-what’s-happening attempts to direct attention to them, the researchers add. This and other new data “suggest that commenting is widespread among primates,” they write.</b></font></p> </body>