“If you ever met a chimp you know immediately they are very bright and incredibly astute, smart creatures.”
— Patrick Gannon, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
 The planum temporale on the side of the brain is believed to control language. (ABCNEWS.com) |
W A S H I N G T O N, Jan. 8 — They act like us, they look like us, they can understand our language to some extent, and now researchers say they have evidence that chimpanzees have some of the same brain structures for communication as humans.
Chimps, our closest cousins, may have smaller brains, but the part of the brain believed to control language is similar, physical anthropologist Patrick Gannon of New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine and colleagues reported.
He and a team at Columbia University and the National Institutes of Health found similarities in a small area on the side of the brain called the planum temporale.
The planum temporale is normally bigger on the left side of the brain than on the right in people. It was also enlarged in the same way in all but one of 18 preserved chimp brains directly observed by Gannon's team using a low-power microscope.
Gannon said the findings support theories that chimpanzees do use language, just not in the same way that people do.
"The theories have been that this area is related to schizophrenia, musical talent, dyslexia—all of these human traits," Gannon said in an interview.
"So now it's obvious it's not unique to humans. It throws a spanner (wrench) in the works."
98 Percent Identical
Researchers have taught chimpanzees and gorillas to communicate with humans using in some cases up to 100 words of American sign language, and in other cases a language made of computer icons. Chimpanzees appear about as good at understanding commands in these languages as a 2½-year-old human is at understanding spoken sentences.
In the wild, chimpanzees appear to communicate using a combination of gestures, hoots and grunts. Researchers note that chimpanzees share 98 percent of their genes with humans.
"I think that chimps have their own complex form of language that we do not as yet understand. They are able to understand a lot of the things (we teach them) and I think the next level will be to try to understand their language," Gannon said.
"If you ever met a chimp you know immediately they are very bright and incredibly astute, smart creatures."
The next step would be to study live chimps, using positron emission tomography (PET) scans to watch their brains at work as they did language tasks.
"These same areas of the brain are used by people born deaf who use sign language," he said. "(It seems) this area of the brain doesn't care where the information is coming from—it just cares that it's communication information."
A Communication Center
Their paper, published in the journal Science, said it's possible this area of the brain actually has nothing to do with language, or that chimps use it for some other purpose.
"I don't think they have a language, but I do agree that they have some kind of communication system that might be more complex than we have heretofore thought," Ralph Holloway, an anthropology professor at Columbia University who worked on the paper, said in a statement.
Gannon said he and colleagues looked at orangutan and gorilla brains and had found the same similarity. He figures the brain structure dates back to a common ancestor of all great apes and humans.
Gannon said the findings also support activists who oppose using chimps for scientific research. He said many laboratories have already abandoned using them and now many chimpanzees lack a place to live.
"Now it's time to make their lives a little more pleasant," he said.
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