In 2010, nine new arrivals from a Dutch safari park used an excited, high-pitched call for apples – while the locals used a disinterested grunt.
By 2013, the Dutch chimps had switched to a similar low grunt, despite an undiminished passion for apples.
This is the first evidence of chimps re-learning such “referential calls”.
The findings, reported in the journal Current Biology, suggest that when chimp grunts refer to objects, they can function in a surprisingly similar way to human words – instead of simply being governed by how the chimp feels about the object.
via BBC
