THIS MONTH PLANET OF THE APES

Q Could apes ever really learn to talk as they do in the Planet of the Apes movies?

Philip Lieberman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University, used models of the vocal tracts of primates to explore whether speech was physiologically possible for monkeys and apes. He determined that they would be unable to talk because their vocal tracts are shorter than those of humans, which evolved over time due to upright walking. But evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist William Tecumseh Sherman Fitch III, from the University of Vienna, ascertained in his research that apes could speak but just not in the way that humans do, because they would be unable to create vowel sounds. More recently, Dieter Steklis, a professor at the University of Arizona, and his wife Netzin, a lecturer at the same institution, researched vocalisation capabilities and concluded that ‘the idea that you just have to make the ape smarter and it will speak is not a credible scenario’. Though monkeys and apes have the neurological capacity to vocalise, they lack certain neurological specialisations that humans have for language and speech production. That’s not to say that apes are unable to communicate with humans – chimpanzees have successfully used a gestural language (a form of American Sign Language) to ‘talk’ to humans, and a bonobo ape called Kanzi was able to use keyboard symbols to communicate. But speaking full sentences and holding a conversation? Nope. And according to Netzin, it’s unlikely they could learn to ride horses either.

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