P H I L A D E L P H I A,   Feb. 14 — Language is not the sole domain of the human race, say researchers who contend that apes are skilled enough in the art of communication to instruct their young and organize meetings among adults.
     Although linguists believe language skills reside solely in the structure of the human brain, anthropologists have found the ability to communicate may be one of the evolutionary links between humankind and our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, apes.
     "They look like us, they think like us, they feel like us. They are like us," Georgia State University researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh said Saturday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Talk With The Animals
Savage-Rumbaugh, one of the world's leading authorities on primate communication, studies chimpanzees and bonobos—African pygmy chimpanzees—at the Language Research Center in Atlanta, where communication between human and primate is conducted mainly though computer-generated images.
     She also has ventured out into the natural bonobo habitats in the jungles of central Africa.
     Apes in the wild smash plants as a way of marking trails between their feeding grounds and tree-top retreats, she said. There also is reason to suspect they use silent communication to decide when to leave the trees and where to gather afterwards.
     Meanwhile, results of studies at the research center suggest apes understand semantics and syntax so well that Savage-Rumbaugh wonders if they are unable to speak only because they lack a human voice tract.
     "When they can pour the milk into the juice, instead of pouring the juice into the milk, that's evidence for an understanding of language," she told a news conference.

Controversial Findings
As a scientist, Savage-Rumbaugh has been derided by colleagues who contend that language is produced by an asymmetrical brain structure found only in humans. They argue that animals' faculty is mere instinct.
     But that, she contended, may parallel early scientific prejudices which cast African hunter-gatherers and other aboriginal peoples as having less well-developed brains than whites.
     Recently, her ideas and those of like-minded researchers have been boosted by a study that shows chimpanzees to have the same structural asymmetry as humans in an area of the brain associated with language comprehension.
     Preliminary evidence also suggests that bonobo mothers physically interact with their young offspring in ways similar to the instructive interaction of human mothers and infants, said Barbara King, a biological anthropologist at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Body Language, Too
In King's preliminary study of a female ape called Matata and her young offspring Elikya, the pair appeared to communicate through patterned body movements. For example, the mother appeared to teach the infant to walk by leading it across the floor while walking backwards.
     "What this evidence suggests is that we can learn about language origins by looking at species other than our own," said King, who stopped short of describing the body communication as language.
     She also cited similar studies by other scientists.
     "There is at least one (bonobo) mother that is routinely teaching her infant signals for when she wants to move off and join her group," King said.
     "She flexes her knees and looks back at the infant. And by doing this repeatedly—teaches her infant to jump on her back. She does this by placing the infant up on a rock and having a practice session."

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