14 DAY TRIAL // A new study reveals that orangutans are capable of communicating with each other, and with human caregivers, by using their ability to mime. The primates can therefore produce pantomime, in order to ensure that the message they are trying to transmit has gotten across. The conclusions are based on two decades of scientific observations.
Over this study period, a team led by two experts managed to decipher an estimated 18 occasions in which orangutans used extensive miming to get their point across. In these instances, the animals usually wanted to request something, but they also used the gestures in other circumstances.
According to the science group, the new data may finally provide evolutionary biologists with additional insight into how the most ancient form of human sign language developed. Our ancestors are believed to have used head and head gestures to communicate for millions of years.
In a paper published in the August 9 issue of the esteemed scientific journal Biology Letters, the researchers say that, on 14 occasions, the primates were found to be miming for humans. It were only observed miming to each other on 4 separate instances. The frequency of these phenomena may be higher in unobserved habitats.
The studies were conducted at a forest-based conservation center in Borneo. Orangutans here are often wiped by caregivers when they get mud on their faces. Usually, the humans use leafs, and some of the primates apparently got used to the royal treatment. In one instance, one of them handed a leaf to one of the scientists.
“I played dumb. He waited a respectable few seconds, then – all the while looking me in the eye – he took back the leaf, [and] rubbed it on his own forehead,” says York University in Toronto cognitive ecologist Anne Russon. She is also a coauthor of the new investigation.
The miming behavior is very interested because it hints at advanced cognitive processes going on inside the mind of orangutans. If they mimic their intentions, then this means that they can tell the humans didn't get the point they were trying to make through other means.
As such, they prove they are willing to go the extra mile to make the humans they interact with understand what they need. This is an incredible discovery, and one that is bound to elicit numerous controversies in the international scientific community, Science News reports.