Orangutan Rocky could provide the key to understanding how speech in humans evolved from the time of the ancestral great apes

Previously it was thought that great apes – our closest relatives – could not learn to produce new sounds and because speech is a learned behaviour it could not have originated from them. In an imitation “do-as-I-do” game, eleven-year-old Rocky, who was eight at the time of the research, was able to copy the pitch and tone of sounds made by researchers to make vowel-like calls. The discovery, led by Durham University, UK, shows that orangutans could have the ability to control their voices. Alexander Mielke of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, was part of the international research team.