NPR reports:

Researchers have found two important building blocks of human speech in wild chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives.

A pair of studies finds that chimp communication includes both rhythmic structures and call combinations, two key elements of spoken language.

Taken together, the studies add to an emerging “early footprint” indicating how human language may have evolved, says Catherine Crockford, an author of one of the studies and a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Lyon.

The chimp findings also bolster research on communication in other primates, including orangutans and bonobos.

However, studies like these are increasingly hard to carry out, researchers say, as wild chimpanzee populations are depleted by hunting, the pet trade, and habitat destruction.

The study of rhythmic structures, which appears in the journal Current Biology, analyzed the drumming patterns of chimps from the rainforests in East and West Africa.

The trees in those rainforests often have large buttress roots extending from the trunk that make “fantastic resonant drumming surfaces,” says Cat Hobaiter, an author of the study and a professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. [Continue reading…]

Could drumming chimps hint at the first flickers of spiritual thought?

Chimpanzees across Africa have been observed rhythmically drumming on trees, offering fresh insight into the roots of musicality and communicationhttps://t.co/kzzN2JTXez pic.twitter.com/UxaIfSFg3G

— New Scientist (@newscientist) May 13, 2025