PLOS BiologyJun 24, 2025
How smart are #NonHumanPrimates? This study shows that #macaques can learn to rearrange members of 5-object sequences to non-adjacent positions, suggesting that they form non-spatial cognitive maps of item relationships during learning, a hallmark of #intelligent behavior @PLOSBiology https://plos.io/40fZIKi
OttermarieJul 14, 2024
#SilentSunday #nonhumanprimates #wildlife #spidermonkey #pasopacifico
Radical AnthropologyDec 20, 2023

Except primate communication systems, vocal, gestural or multimodal are NOT 'language'.

Language is a fundamentally #digital system -- uniquely among animal #communication systems. It makes 'infinite use of finite means'. NH primate gesture and vocalisation remains #analog and cannot do this.

Our affective outbursts like 'oh!' 'Ahh!' etc are aspects of NH primate communication still in our repertoire -- they are not the linguistic elements.

#language #evolution #nonhumanprimates
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-decode-language-primate-cousins.html

Can we decode the language of our primate cousins?

A UNIGE team shows that the human brain is capable of identifying the vocalizations of certain primate species, if they are close to us and if the frequencies used are also close to our own.

Phys.org