Bonobo calls reveal language-like traits
Bonobos' vocal calls share an unexpected feature of human communication, suggesting that the building blocks of language developed earlier in our evolutionary history than previously thought.
Bonobos, our species' joint-closest relative alongside chimpanzees, make noises that stand for concepts, like 'run' or 'predator.'
Now, researchers have found that the apes appear to use one sound to modify the meaning of another, New Scientist reported: For example, combining the sounds for 'pay attention' and 'I am excited' seemed equivalent to 'pay attention to me because I am in distress.'
This ability is key to human language, but had never been observed among animals before. The finding suggests the roots of language existed at least seven million years ago, when bonobos and humans diverged.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Yahoo
The Carbon Removal Industry Is Already Lagging Behind Where It Needs to Be
It may be time to suck it up — and we don't just mean the carbon in the atmosphere. No, we're talking about reckoning with the possibility that our attempts at capturing the greenhouse gas to stave off climate disaster are already hopelessly behind schedule, New Scientist reports, if they're not in vain entirely. To illustrate, here're some simple numbers. The CO2 removal industry expects to hit a milestone of removing one million metric tons of CO2 this year. And companies across the globe have bought carbon credits to remove 27 million more, according to data from cited in the reporting (more on these carbon credit schemes in a moment). That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. As New Scientist notes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the leading authority on these issues — concluded in a 2022 report that we need to be removing up to 16 billion tons of carbon, not millions, each year to keep the rise in global temperature from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the middle of the century, past which the most drastic effects of climate change are believed to be irreversible. "It's not scaling up as fast as it would need to if we are going to reach multiple gigatons by 2050," Robert Höglund at Marginal Carbon, a climate consultancy based in Sweden, told the magazine. Carbon capture is not the be-all and end-all. The fact remains that humanity needs to drastically reduce its emissions, which probably means reorganizing society — or at least its energy production and consumption — as we know it. Simply removing the CO2 that's already there is more like a band-aid that buys us a little time; eventually, we'll need to rip it off. For these reasons, some critics fear that carbon capture — and even more drastic interventions, like attempting to dim the Sun — could distract from the climate change's systemic causes. But there's a lot of enthusiasm for the approach all the same, both from scientists and investors. The IPCC acknowledged in its 2022 report that carbon removal was "unavoidable" — as in, essential to meeting climate targets. One popular method of carbon removal is called direct air capture, which involves sucking the carbon straight from the air using massive industrial facilities. A more circuitous approach that's gaining steam involves extracting CO2 out of the ocean, freeing up room for the world's largest carbon sink to passively absorb even more of the greenhouse gas. All of these initiatives, though, are basically just getting off the ground. And the corporate investment, which once promised billions of dollars in cash, seems to be cooling. More than 90 percent of all carbon removal credits sold this year were bought by a single company, Microsoft, New Scientist notes, probably to gloss over its egregious energy bill it's accrued from building loads of AI datacenters. This also touches on the fact that the practice of buying carbon credits can be used as a means of corporate greenwashing. By paying to another firm to "certify" that they will remove a certain amount of carbon at some undetermined point in the future, a company can report a greener carbon balance sheet without actually reducing its emissions. In any case, staking the industry's hopes on corporate munificence is a dicey prospect indeed. "I have been raising the alarm for about a year and a half," Eli Mitchell-Larson at Carbon Gap, a UK carbon dioxide removal advocacy organisation, told New Scientist. "If we're just waiting for the waves of free philanthropic money from corporations to fill a hole on their sustainability report, we're not really going to solve the problem." More on climate change: Scientists Just Found Who's Causing Global Warming
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Yahoo
Archaeolgists Make Surprising Discovery About Ice Age Hunting Tools
A recent study published in Nature Communications has found the first-known evidence of human beings manufacturing tools out of whale bones. Throughout 26 rock shelters and caves within northern Spain and southwestern France, researchers found 173 bone specimens, including 83 tools and 90 fragments. An analysis using Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) found that 131 of those specimens were whale bones belonging to sperm whales, gray whales, blue whales, fin whales, and right or bowhead whales.'Our study reveals that the bones came from at least five species of large whales, the oldest of which date to approximately 19,000–20,000 years ago,' lead author Jean-Marc Pétillon said in a press release. 'These represent some of the earliest known evidence of humans using whale remains as tools.' The bones bear little sign of water wear, which means they were likely harvested from animals which had washed up on the shore rather than deep-sea hunting. Many of the tools were dated between 17,500 and 16,000 years ago, though the oldest specimen found dates back 20,000 years. In particular, the bones of sperm whales were found to be particularly popular in fashioning spears and other hunting instruments. Over 40 percent of projectile points and 73 percent of foreshafts analyzed were created from sperm whale bones.'What was more surprising to me, as an archaeologist more accustomed to terrestrial faunas, was that these whale species remained the same despite the great environmental difference between the Late Pleistocene and today,' Pétillon told Popular Science. 'In the same period, continental faunas are very different: the ungulates hunted include reindeer, saiga antelopes, bison, etc., all disappeared from Western Europe today.'Pétillon believes ancient people came from far and wide to scavenge whale bones and other parts when they washed up on shore. With further research, he and his team hope to deduce why tools constructed from whale bone declined so rapidly 16,000 years ago. 'The news of a stranding travels fast first, because it smells a lot [from a] long distance away, so people would concentrate from quite far,' Pétillon told New Scientist. 'So, it might not have been the main driver of people going to the seashore, but when that happened, it probably had an influence on the movement of the people who probably changed their planned pattern of movement to go there.'Archaeolgists Make Surprising Discovery About Ice Age Hunting Tools first appeared on Men's Journal on May 30, 2025
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Yahoo
Scientists Intrigued by Strange Behavior of Distant Planet
A team of astronomers observed a confused exoplanet orbiting its two parent stars in a highly unusual way. As New Scientist reports, the planet, which was first discovered in 2004, is located in a system called Nu Octantis 72 light-years away, and is twice the size of Jupiter. After it was spotted, some physicists thought its mere existence was impossible due to its extremely close proximity to its twin stars. But according to a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers is proposing a wild new theory to explain how the planet could exist while also having such an extremely tight orbit. They propose that one of the stars and the planet orbit the second star in two opposite directions. In other words, the planet is retrograde, or orbiting the star in reverse. "The existence of this planet has been controversial, because there were no observational precedents and we expect planets to form in prograde orbit if they form at the same time as the stars," coauthor and University of Hong Kong professor Man Hoi Lee told IFLScience. To make matters even more unusual, the researchers propose that the planet's orbit is sandwiched between the two stars, forcing it to thread the needle during each orbit. It's an erratic dance that highlights how much there's still to learn about the complex orbital mechanics of multi-star systems. "It invites scientists to consider a wider range of star and planet scenarios regarding both formation and evolution," University of Texas at Arlington professor Manfred Cuntz, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist. One of the system's stars is a white dwarf, indicating it's nearing the end of its life cycle and making Nu Octantis an even more exotic outlier. The scientists estimate that the system was formed 2.9 billion years ago. However, the planet came to be much later. The researchers propose that it either used to orbit both stars, and changed to its unusual trajectory after one of the stars turned into a white dwarf, or it accreted its considerable mass from said white dwarf. But more research is needed before they can develop a more accurate picture of how the planet evolved. "Observations of other planets in tight binary systems with late-stage or post-main- sequence stellar components will provide additional clues for us to better understand the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems," the team wrote in its paper. The researchers are already excited to get a closer glimpse of a similar binary star system, such as HD 59686, which also hosts an enormous gas giant with six times the mass of Jupiter. More on binary star systems: Alpha Centauri Sending Stream of Objects Into Our Solar System, Scientists Propose
