... We've Got Something to Say

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Visit the monkey house at any zoo and it'd be hard to conclude that man's near relative has much to say. But researchers at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, writing in Nature last week, have concluded that monkeys do indeed use simple verbal communication. They observed male putty-nosed monkeys in Nigeria's Gashaka Gumti National Park and found the primates produced a series of calls containing two basic sounds to alert others to predators. "These calls were not produced randomly, and a number of distinct patterns emerged," says Kate Arnold, one of the researchers.

"Pyow" warned that a leopard was loitering nearby, while "hack" indicated an eagle was hovering overhead. A series of the two sounds — the "pyow-hack" sequence — served as a command for the group to move to safer ground. Roughly translated, that would be: "Let's go!"

Scientists have long known that some animals vocalize sounds to express emotion. Captive chimps have been taught hand signals, and dolphins use sounds to communicate with each other. But the new research shows that monkeys add meaning to their limited vocabulary by combining calls into phrases, an ability previously ascribed only to humans. Monkey talk may sound like gibberish to the human ear, but to monkeys it makes perfect sense.