This haunts me. Gorillas and chimps are crazy smart and can be taught sign language, so why can’t they speak? They have human-like mouths and they’re obviously vocal, so why don’t they at least have the vocabulary of a toddler?
In:
No one mentioned the hyoid bone. The hyoid bone is a horseshoe shaped bone that is located under your tongue, close to your lower jaw. It is the only bone in the human body that is not connected to other bones, and is only connected to muscles. The hyoid bone attaches to your tongue, and allows for very precise control over the tongue muscle. This fine manipulation is a big part of why speech is possible.
Other apes have a hyoid bone, but it is shaped differently. The hyoid in other apes is located *behind* the root of the tongue muscle, and so it doesn’t allow for the same range of tongue movement as it does in humans. Additionally, it’s postulated that the hyoid bone prevents other apes from closing off their airway using their tongue muscle the way that humans do. Think of the word “hung”. That “ng” is caused by closing off your airway in your throat.
The last thing that I will mention is the amount of nerves controlling the tongue, lips, and cheeks. In humans and apes nerves pass through a vertebra at the top of the spine. In humans, the opening is proportionally much larger than it is in other apes, which suggests that humans have more motor neurons controlling the tongue, cheeks, and lips – the muscles used for speech.
Edit: a couple sources [1](https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/hyoid-bulla) [2](https://www.livescience.com/7468-hyoid-bone-changed-history.html)
Humans have genetic differences that essentially allow us to vocalise and breathe at the same time. I think there was a chimp who managed a few words at a time but its not usual, they don’t have the correct structures. Puts us at the top of the list of animals most likely to choke but being able to communicate complicated ideas vocally is a huge competitive advantage
Long story short it appears that they don’t have the ability to ask questions.
Asking questions gives rise to a conversation and the ability to build a language.
At this point only humans and one parent have ever asked a question.
There are multiple other examples why they would happen in ability to have what would be considered conversations.
On the side note dolphins have full conversations with each other and actually make extended plans and create games between themselves.
So this probably isn’t a completely accurate answer but it almost certainly has something to do with it.
The sign language is overstated. You can teach them to make signal for a product. But have you ever seen anybody have conversation with any ape via sign language?
>why can’t great apes speak?
Technically, humans are great apes.
Some point in the last 5 million years after we forked away from the last common ancestor shared, in newfound isolation both groups started developing genetic differences that were beneficial to them.. Every new born gets 60 genetic mutations where each one can big or small, good or bad..
Pretty much every racial characteristic we have come from mutations that we embrace collectively
At some point a child was born with the FOXP2 gene, a new genetic mutation.. It granted a very subtle difference that allowed the kid to not just grunt out emotional outbursts, but to use vocalizations as constant identifiers for recognizable objects and such which was much more energy efficient than belting out emotional outbursts as sole means of communication. Some accepted it, some didn’t.. There were other forks but the subset of homo genus that embraced speech among many other energy efficient changes likely aided them in proliferating into today’s modern day human
To this very day people are (Very rarely) born with mutations where the FOXP2 gene disappears just as mysteriously as any genetic trait appears.. They have great difficulty using speech even though there is no detectable physical difference
Their brains have all the hardware for vision and none for speech. So you know that universal human reaction to be afraid of snakes and see them in any patterns of leaves etc? Well that takes a big portion of our brain and all the room in a monkey brain. They’re really good at understanding what they see and incredible eye hand coordination, like that chimp finishing the american ninja course without a bother.
I know this because most of the inovation in computer vision and AI research can be traced back from the findings on rhesus monkeys in the 80s seeing how neuron layers activate and are creating the thought/notion of a fruit. And I was quite surprised how big of a chunk of brain is used for that and how the same form and structure is present in the human brain, how in monkeys that’s the dominant hardware they have, and how in us we have so many other structures like the cortex.
>can be taught sign language
Not one of them has ever used sign language to ask a question.
It is coded in your DNA how you get built from just an egg. It contains info to make a whole new living being. However as you are coded in a way that you will be a being that talks, you have that tools avaliable to you in that code and will eventually have that tools in final build. It is really similiar to building a computer. Lets say you were an android in human form; to be able to speak first you need phsical tools for that such as tongue, cords, lungs etc. Then you will need what we can call the hardware. In our brains; we don’t start with perfect software(driver) for many things but we get to have hardware(sound card) that allows it to be used to start with. It is such a neat way because we create our own software based on our own hardware. Our senses gather informations which we are not familiar with at first such as sound, noises, light etc. then in time we learn to give them meaning and finally create a software that effectively hears, sees etc. This way we get to have a custom made driver for our own system and even if we would be different from other humans, we get to have a nice working set up since its custom made for each of us. If that wasn’t the case and we started with an inbuild software then any difference in our build could make our software have troubles. Here comes to your answer, even with brain power equals to us, without our tools, apes may still not be able to speak as we do since they won’t have the process I described. It is not only our intelligence that allows us to use all the sound gathered by our ears to understand. First our hardware along with the software in our brain filters the sound and gives them meaning. Only then we use the filtered sound for listening. If we didn’t have strong tools for filtering meaningful noise in a way that can be effectively used in communication, we would have hard time with it as well.
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