Bonobos Talk Like Us? A New Study Says It’s Not That Far Off

Their chatter isn’t just noise — it might hold clues to the origins of human language

I used to think I’d grow up and live in the jungle with apes.

Not metaphorically — I imagined mornings spent quietly tracking primates through the underbrush, afternoons logging vocalizations in sun-dappled notebooks, and nights listening to pant-hoots echo through the trees. 

I didn’t become a primatologist, but I’ve spent the better part of my life studying how life evolves and adapts, from ancient ecosystems to modern conservation strategies. Still, whenever new research comes out about great apes such as gorillas, bonobos, or chimps, it feels like that dream taps me on the shoulder.

That’s probably why a new paper published in Science stopped me mid-scroll. The headline?

Bonobos Combine Calls in Ways Strikingly Similar to Human Language.

It’s the kind of study that brings together everything I’ve spent my career trying to understand: how complex behaviors evolve, how communication systems change over time, and how much of our humanity might actually be rooted in something far more ancient.

So, what did the researchers actually discover?

Led by a team from the University of Zurich and Harvard, the study focused on wild bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bonobos, along with chimpanzees, are our closest living relatives. We’ve known for a while that they’re highly social, emotionally intelligent, and full of surprises. But this paper zoomed in on how they use vocalizations. Not just individually but in combination in a group.

And those combinations? They’re more sophisticated than we thought. Let me explain.

In human language, we often combine words to create new meanings. Sometimes it’s simple: “blue shirt” just means the shirt is blue. That’s called trivial compositionality. But sometimes, it gets trickier. Think about “fake news.” It’s not news that happens to be fake — it’s a specific phrase with a new, blended, complex meaning. That’s nontrivial compositionality, and it’s one of the building blocks of human communication.

Until now, most scientists believed animals could only do the simple kind. But this study shows bonobos are capable of both.

“This suggests that the capacity to combine call types in complex ways is not as unique to humans as we once thought,” said lead researcher Dr. Mélissa Berthet.

But how did they figure it out?

The team recorded 700 vocalizations and combinations from wild bonobos and then analyzed the context in which each was used. Was the bonobo grooming? Displaying? Building a nest? 

They tracked over 300 contextual cues per utterance and applied techniques borrowed from linguistics, especially something called distributional semantics. That’s just a fancy way of mapping meaning based on how and when things are used — kind of like how streaming platforms recommend movies based on what you’ve already watched.

The researchers then placed each call into a kind of semantic space, like dots on a multidimensional graph (see the figure below). If two calls occurred in similar contexts, their dots were closer together. If a combination landed somewhere new, it suggested that bonobos were creating a new, meaningful phrase — not just stacking sounds.

So what do bonobos actually “say”?

Let’s break it down with an example. One bonobo call, the grunt, was often used to draw attention: “Hey, look at me.” Another, the yelp, seemed more like an imperative: “Let’s do this.” When bonobos combined the two into yelp-grunt, it was usually during nest-building time. That combo seems to mean something like: “Focus up, we’re building the nest now.”

But that’s a fairly straightforward case. The real breakthrough came with combinations like peep-whistle. Individually, peep might signal a suggestion, while whistle is about group cohesion. Put them together, and bonobos were using it during socially sensitive interactions, like mating or displays of status. The meaning isn’t just the sum of its parts — it’s nuanced, context-dependent, and eerily human.

“Bonobos seem to combine calls to convey meanings that can’t be expressed by single calls alone,” the authors wrote.

But why does it matter?

From an evolutionary perspective, this changes how we think about language. It’s no longer accurate to say that the ability to build complex meaning from small pieces suddenly appeared in humans. Instead, it looks like this capacity may have been present at least 7 million years ago, in our last common ancestor with bonobos.

For those of us who’ve spent time thinking about the deep history of life, this kind of discovery doesn’t just fill in the blanks — it reframes the whole picture. It suggests language didn’t explode into being but was built, slowly, on foundations laid by other species.

It also reminds me how much we still don’t understand about the animals we share the planet with. Bonobos aren’t just “almost human.” They have their own intelligence, their own culture, and clearly, their own ways of talking to each other.

Final thoughts

I’ve spent years piecing together stories from fossils, forest surveys, and ecological data. But some of the most exciting moments in science come when we realize a gap we thought separated us from other animals might just be a misunderstanding.

This paper doesn’t mean bonobos have grammar or syntax like we do. But it does mean they’re working with something surprisingly close. And that brings us one step closer to understanding how something as strange and powerful as human language came to be.

Whether you’re a linguist, a biologist, or just someone who wonders what the animals around us are really saying, this study is worth your attention. 

And for me? It’s a reminder that my childhood heroes — Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey — weren’t just studying animals. They were listening to conversations we were only just beginning to understand.

Published in Fossils et al. Follow to learn more about Paleontology and Evolution.

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I’m thrilled you’re here. Stay curious, and thank you for sharing this journey with me!

Best,

Sílvia P-M, PhD Climate Ages