Two Chimpanzees Were Observed Uttering Human-Like Words Like 'Mama' in Rare Video

“Mama,” Johnny said the word while scratching his face when the woman behind the cage asked him to do so. As he uttered this word, the woman placed a red jelly twizzler in his mouth to enjoy. Johnny, a hulking black chimpanzee from Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Florida, was one of the two chimpanzees that researchers studied to unveil a mysterious connection between the auditory systems of humans and chimpanzees. After studying two old videos of chimpanzees in captivity, they documented this connection in a paper published in Scientific Reports.

From previous studies, researchers assumed that humans alone can make meaningful sounds. "It has been argued that 'mama' may have been among the first words to appear in human speech," researchers wrote in the paper. But two footage from the 1900s shattered their assumption and caused them to ponder a fresh possibility. Led by phonetician and cognitive scientist Axel Ekstrom, the team of researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology studied one home video and a 1960s newsreel to derive some stunning insights.

Apart from Johnny, Renata was the other chimpanzee, from Italy, whose footage was studied by the researchers. Like Johnny, Renata was observed to be uttering the word “mama” when he was rubbed on the chin. In both cases, the chimps appeared to “possess the necessary control” for human-like speech. It indicated that primates can shift their speech and jaw muscles for consonant and vowel sounds, as scientists noted in the study. This also implies that there is nearly 99% of shared DNA between chimps and humans, according to the American Museum of Natural History.

Previously, it was assumed that only human babies produce this sound pattern of “m-vowel-m.” But after Johnny and this other chimpanzee uttered “mama,” researchers knew they were missing a crucial piece of information. "The hypothesized missing link precluding chimpanzees from voluntary jaw-voice coupling evidently does not exist," the researchers wrote in the paper.

Sourcing from an earlier study, published in the International Journal of Primatology, Ekstrom also analyzed the sound recording of a third chimp, named Viki. Viki had been observed to be speaking the words “papa” and “cup.” The findings extracted from Johnny and Renata coincided with the findings they derived from Viki’s recording, implying that chimpanzees’ brains are capable of mimicking at least some of the sounds they hear from humans. “Mama” is one of them.

However, the fuss isn’t just about this bizarre similarity between human and chimpanzee brains. The fuss is also about the common ancestral unit that the two species might have. These findings indicate, to some extent at least, that the auditory system of humans could be much older than previously thought, likely stemming from songbirds and chimps. "Great apes can produce human words," Ekström and his team of researchers said, concluding the study. "The failure to demonstrate this half a century ago was the fault of the researchers, not the animals."

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