eli5 how humans can make so many sounds while most other animals with a tongue and mouth can make only few
In: Biology
I’m not sure your initial premise is sound… Dolphins, whales, bats. If you tried to catalog bird phonemes it would make the range of human sounds look infantile in comparison. Dogs have a wide variety of expressive vocalizations. I wouldn’t be surprised if rodents do, too, but they are so short and high pitched that the nuance is lost on us.
Brain.
Also have you heard birds?
If your head has to be exactly the perfect shape to catch your food, it’s going to be harder to adapt it to making sounds.
Also, lots of animals don’t really need to make a wide variety of sounds. Maybe one loud one to scare off threats, and a few situation-specific alarm cries. We have complex social interactions, a lot of information to communicate to each other, and huge brains to encode that information into sounds.
We do have a pretty big vocal range compared to a lot of other animals, which makes sense because that is our primary way of communicating and we are social animals. Lots of other animals use body language, or they aren’t social animals and so they only need a small number of sounds to communicate basic concepts like fuck off. However we are far from the top of the list. There are many species of birds that can make every sound a human can make plus many many more. I would guess if you ranked every animal that makes noise based on how many they can make we would be near the top, but there would still be a tremendous gap between how many we can make and how many the top animals can make.
(o/t) Reddit’s patterns can sometimes emerge. The upper comments are of the “Wrong!1 OP’s post is silly and easily countered because…”-variety, and then a bit further down there are the “Well you have a good point, but here’s a somewhat more nuanced view…”-type
The empty can rattles the most
Google homunculus. Humans have a very large proportion of their brain dedicated to sensation in the lips and tongue. This is why we generate a larger range of sounds compared to other animals.
Here’s my cat talking. He’s saying I love you but then he jumped down and puked.
we have a large vocal range, but it’s also important to remember that so many animals produce noises that are out of our hearing range entirely!!
Others have pointed out that animals can make a wide range of noises, possibly larger than a human’s. Notably, humans did not evolve to understand the noises of other animals with nearly the same precision as noises of other humans, nor did most of us grow up listening to minute differences in birdsong with as much focus as we do with humans. It’s similar to facial recognition; other animals can have just as much difference in appearance from one another as humans, but we don’t have as much reason to differentiate animals like that, so our brain is neither designed for nor receives as much practice as identifying those differences.
Our tongues evolved to make lots of sounds. That is what gives us the ability to make words
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