Orangutans Are Cool

We’re always wary of anthropomorphizing our animal friends – for one thing it might be insulting for many creatures to be associated with human traits. But the recent news that orangutans use “slang” in order to be “cool” are attributes we can get behind. The new research appears in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Adriano R. Lameira and a team from the University of Warwick’s Department of Psychology lived alongside orangutans in the swamps and low rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. They listened to and recorded the calls of 70 individual apes across six populations, the largest sample ever gathered and analyzed of great-ape vocalizations.

They found that denser orang populations have a large variety of original calls, and that they experimented with novel sound variants, keeping some and dropping others, and always modifying their communiques. By contrast, the apes in lower density populations stuck to more established, conventional calls and did not experiment so much. But when they did introduce a hot new sound they retained it. As a result, the low-density groups developed a richer vocabulary than the populations that continuously discarded new call variants.
The media saw an opening. “Orangutans use 'slang' just like humans do!” the BBC enthused. “Orangutans use slang to ‘show off their coolness’,” offered the Guardian. “Orangutans use slang like schoolchildren” (The Week UK). “Orangutan hipsters use slang to stand out from the pack” (ZME Science).

Even the scientists couldn't resist making the research about us. “Great apes, both in the wild and captivity, are finally helping us to resolve one of the longest-standing puzzles in science – the origin and evolution of language,” Lameira declared. “We can now start conceiving of a gradual path that likely led to the rise of the talking ape, us, instead of having to attribute our unique verbal skills and advanced cognition to divine intervention or random genetic jackpot.”

Fair enough. Maybe not all anthropomorphizing is misguided. “Many more clues await us in the lives of our closest living relatives,” Lameira added, “as long as we manage to guarantee their protection and their preservation in the wild.”

Photo credit: University of Warwick