Primate communication linked to social bonding
- From: Lance <LanceGary@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:45:21 +0200
Primate communication linked to social bonding
* 15:46 24 August 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Duncan Graham-RoweCommunication evolved hand-in-hand with social bonding, suggests a new study of non-human primates, which probes the origins of language.
“The work tells us that communication is right there at the base of social behaviour and that having a larger vocal repertoire allows you to have a more complex social set up,” says Karen McComb, at the University of Sussex, UK, who carried out the work.
McComb, with Stuart Semple at Roehampton University in London, UK, used published data on 42 different non-human primates species to examine the relationships between the number of vocal calls, group size and the length of time spent grooming. They also used phylogenetic analysis to take into account evolutionary relationships between species.
The data analysis showed strong relationships between vocal repertoire size and group size, as well as between repertoire size and the amount of time spent grooming, says McComb: “This suggests that changes in communication can facilitate changes in social behaviour.”
Big hurdles
The analysis only revealed correlations, so it was impossible to determine causal relationships – whether increases in vocal repertoire caused increases in group size and time spent grooming, or vice versa.
It is also important to remember that there are radical differences between non-human primate vocal repertoires and human languages, says McComb. So it does not follow that languages as complex as ours will necessarily follow from increases in group sizes and social interactions. “There are other big hurdles that have to be overcome to get to human language,” she says.
But some human languages may offer clues, such as Pirahã – a language spoken by only 200 people in Amazonas, Brazil. “Their very small inventory of phonemes could presumably have been made by much earlier branches of hominids,” says Daniel Everett, a language expert at Manchester University, UK.
Journal reference: Royal Society Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2005.036)
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7898 .
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Primate communication linked to social bonding
- From: Toby Kelsey
- Re: Primate communication linked to social bonding
- From: Lance
- Re: Primate communication linked to social bonding
- Prev by Date: Loss aversion or possibly minimizing regret in 'Who wants to be a millionaire?'
- Next by Date: Re: Primate communication linked to social bonding
- Previous by thread: Loss aversion or possibly minimizing regret in 'Who wants to be a millionaire?'
- Next by thread: Re: Primate communication linked to social bonding
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
