eli5 how humans can make so many sounds while most other animals with a tongue and mouth can make only few

Question

eli5 how humans can make so many sounds while most other animals with a tongue and mouth can make only few

In: Biology

Answer 1

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.