Bonobos may combine words in ways previously thought unique to humans - Phrases used to smooth over tense social situations have meanings beyond the sum of their parts, study suggests.

[u/-Mystica-]

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv1170

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

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[u/-Mystica- → u/[deleted]]

That's exactly it, and that's why I'm publishing this in philosophy.

As a biologist, I'm very interested in ethology, and every day I discover just how much our supposed superiority or uniqueness stems from our ignorance of other living beings.

[u/mundanepontiff → u/-Mystica-]

Thank you for sharing your work to empirically bridge the collective gap between humans and our ancestral relatives. I feel that it is only going to be more difficult convincing the others that they are not a supreme species that overseas the world verses a critical component in the collective world of living beings.

[u/bildramer → u/mundanepontiff]

But we are supreme, empirically. AFAIK this is literally the only piece of evidence we've ever had that any non-human animal has ever used compositional language (and so I doubt its results will replicate). Human children learn 1000x bigger vocabularies effortlessly. If you want to convince people that humans are very, very superior but not infinitely so, feel free to actually say that.

[u/mundanepontiff → u/bildramer]

Empirical evidence is just really getting started to be gathered, but I believe that humans of today ( relatively recently like 10-20 k years) achieved this self proclaimed status throught sheer volume, collaboration, LUCK,culture, and history. Empirically, without the use of tools and any form, cultual education has few innate "apex species " features. Given the right circumstances, the world could have been dominated by another homind, elephant, or whale/dolphin. Yes , children are smart, but they take several years of intense rearing before even slightly able to survive, which, under most of history, leads to small populations.

[u/swokong333 → u/-Mystica-]

Most of the research in the past was too reliant on lab-based studies.

[u/squidfreud]

Aren’t bonobos exceptionally social? It tracks that a deeper linguistic capacity would be adaptive for them

[u/Fututor_Maximus → u/squidfreud]

Males are more aggressive than Chimpanzees by a factor of around 2. However they don't have the "murder for fun" bit. The problem is Bonobos are the least studied Great Ape. The record breaking 90 something hours with them was only done in the 2020s.

We know 0.1% about them behaviorally and don't know 99.9%. It's just as likely that our limited conjectures turn out to all be wrong, and soon.

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[u/Pure_Seat1711]

So they have subtext?