Bonobos—our closest living relatives—create complex and meaningful combinations of calls resembling the word combinations of humans. The study has investigated the vocal behavior of wild bonobos in ...

The bonobo (Pan paniscus), humanity’s closest cousin, appears to communicate in a way scientists believed was exclusive to humans. Researchers from the University of Zürich and Harvard University said ...

Humans can effortlessly talk about an infinite number of topics, from neuroscience to pink elephants, by combining words into sentences. This is thanks to compositionality: the ability to combine ...

A lot of human society requires what’s called a “theory of mind”—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We ...

Mia, a young bonobo female from the Fekako community, vocalizing in response to distant group members.Image Credit: Martin Surbeck, Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project Humans are adept combiners. As it ...

We humans concoct never-before-heard sentences with ease, embedding phrases within phrases to express the wildest ideas we can dream up (“the purple pangolin that waltzed across the ballroom had a ...