Few of us have heard animals sing, or speak, for that matter. That doesn’t mean they don’t do both. Recent research reveals communication abilities among animals that have been recognized or explored. This article examines what research has been conducted and what it means for future connections between animals and humans.
Source: The New York Times, September 20, 2023. Link. Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that allowed songbirds to learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx, a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. “There was no ‘great leap forward.’”