Posted on 11/30/2001 5:01:58 PM PST by umbra
Three families of anthropoid apes posses an important brain function connected with speech faculties. Earlier it was supposed this function to be exceptionally human brains prerogative. According to BBC, investigators from Atlanta State -Georgia, carried out a resonance-magnetic scanning of a chimpanzee, baboon and gorilla brains. Now the scientists are sure nobody has investigated yet such an important structure of anthrpoid apes brain.
If their discovery is corroborated, it will become one more important contribution to the evolution theory:it will be clear that human being obtained speech faculty before homo sapience and other big primates ways dispersed forever.
In a human brain there is so-called Brock zone, whose one of the components is called the Brockman 44 zone. Namely this zone, situated mostly in the left center hemisphere and partly in the right one, is responsible for forming speech. Claudio Cantalupo and William Hopkins from Georgia State University were puzzled that the apes also possesed this structure, though they could not speak. It is not clear for what functions the apes need this Brock zone, especially taking into account that the primitave anthropoid apes' "language" is not similar to the complicated human speech. This could be explained only with the role gesticulation played in evolution of human speech.
The anthropoid apes observed by the investigators most often gesticulated with their right hand, especially when the accompany their gestures with a kind of vioce signals. If the scientsts' theory is right, the left side of zone-44 was gradually enlarging, while both human predecessors and anthropoid apes were learning gesticulate and produce laryngeal sounds. Though later, by unknown reasons, human gestures and sounds grew into speech, while the apes' ones remained the same gestures forever.
True. But consider this: It's by communicating subtle & complex information to each other that we build a synergistic community (or even just a family or 2 partners in the hunting party, etc.) which greatly enhances our chances in the world. That could be a catalyst for the raw reasoning power to be more important to survival than it otherwise would've been.
Maybe?
Besides they're too dumb to know what it all means.
Apes aren't stupid; they just lost the race for sentience/civilization thank God.
Balderdash. My female Corgi schemes with the best of them. It ain't all "reacting to external stimulus".
All kidding aside, sure they are more advanced than dogs but so what.
They are way more limited that humans.
My dog understands about 30 words but I wouldn't start comparing him to humans that create whole societies.
New York cabs drivers use the same form of communication. Can anthropoid apes drive cabs? What other kind of ape is there, apart from the anthropoid type. I thought all apes were anthropoids.
There's also the theory that toolmaking & manupulating uses the same areas of the brain as forming sentences, so maybe increasing ability for toolmaking also helped pave the way for increasing ability to communicate in more complex ways.
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