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IMAGE: Male Guinea baboons at Niokolo-Koba National Park in Senegal. In interactions male Guinea baboons utter grunts to indicate their benign intentions.
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Credit: Julia Fischer/German Primate Center
Musical masterworks as the Queen of the Night's Aria from Mozart's The Magic Flute, are examples of the sounds trained human voices can produce. The precondition for vocal virtuosity as well as for any spoken word is vocal learning, the ability to imitate auditory input. Some songbirds and bats can do this, but humans excel. We can acquire new languages into old age. To shed light on the evolution of vocal learning, a team led by Julia Fischer from the German Primate Center (DPZ) - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research has analyzed the sound structures of Guinea baboons and was able to show that the grunts of baboons belonging to the same social group were more similar to each other than between the social groups. The changes were modest, however, and can best be conceived as an accent rather than a different language (