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Monkey Sounds and Chimpanzee Sounds
Primates other than humans have vocal communication systems that fit the description of the musilanguage precursor. For example:
- Both gibbons and chimpanzees make vocalizations that biologists consider to be “protomusical,” that is, ancestral or early stage, the kind of vocalizations that our hominid ancestors probably made before their brains enlarged and human-like music and language became possible.
- Vocalizations of East African vervet monkeys convey both emotion and referential meaning.
- Mated pairs of gibbons “sing” duets.
To summarize, language requires a large brain, as does rhythmic, scale-based, harmonic human music. No other species has a brain-to-body-weight ratio as high as humans, and no other species has either music or language. With so much in common, it’s likely music and language co-evolved from precursor animal calls.