New research reveals chimpanzee ‘language’ to be complex - The World from PRX

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist and your guide to the fascinating, sometimes startling, always moving world of our closest relatives on this planet. Every episode I bring you true stories about primates — their intelligence, their social lives, their biology — because the more we understand them, the more we understand ourselves. June: Before we dive in, a warm thank you to the sponsors who make this show possible: Ada, who helps organizations thoughtfully integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting spanning everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio across the silicon industry. We're grateful for all of them. June: Today's episode is a big one. We're going to talk about what scientists are learning about chimpanzee communication — and honestly, it might make you rethink what "language" even means. We're going to dig into the largest genetic study of chimpanzees ever conducted, and what our shared D N A reveals about resilience. And we're going to sit with something harder — a story about orangutans in Borneo, forests on fire, and why it matters so much that we're paying attention. The through-line today, as always: we are more alike than we imagine. June: Let's get into it. June: So — chimpanzee language. I want to start here because there's a study making waves right now, and it genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Researchers have been digging into how chimpanzees communicate, and what they're finding is that chimp vocalizations are far more complex, far more structured, than we previously gave them credit for. June: Now, for a long time — and I'll be honest, even within primatology — there was this assumption that non-human primates had a kind of fixed repertoire of calls. Alarm calls, food calls, contact calls. Each one meaning a single specific thing. Almost like a set of buttons. Press this button, get this meaning. June: But the new research is showing that chimpanzees don't just have individual calls. They're combining them. Sequencing them. And the meaning of those combinations isn't just the sum of the parts — it can be something new entirely. That's a crucial distinction. That's what linguists call compositionality, and for a very long time, compositionality was considered one of the defining features of human language. June: Think about how we use words. "Dog bites man" means something completely different from "man bites dog." Same words, different order, different meaning. Chimpanzees appear to be doing something in that same ballpark — not identical, but in the same neighborhood. June: What the researchers did was meticulously record and analyze chimp vocalizations in the wild — in West Africa — and map out which call combinations appeared in which contexts. And they found real patterns. Calls that appear together in sequence reliably predicted specific situations — things like the presence of a predator, or an invitation to travel together. The combinations weren't random. They were structured. June: And here's what I find so moving about this. Chimpanzees aren't just reacting to the world. They're describing it. They're sharing information in a structured way with others in their community. That is not so different from what you and I are doing right now. June: Of course — and I want to be careful here — this is not the same as human language. The complexity, the grammar, the open-endedness of what we do is extraordinary. But what this research suggests is that the building blocks, the seeds of combinatorial communication, were present in our shared ancestor. We didn't invent language from nothing. We elaborated on something that was already there. June: And I think that reframes the question beautifully. Instead of asking "do chimps have language?" — which tends to set up a binary, a pass or fail — we can ask: where on the continuum of communication do they sit? And increasingly, the answer is: closer to us than we thought. June: There's something almost vertiginous about that, if you sit with it. The next time you're having a conversation — making a joke, expressing worry, telling someone you love them — some thread of that capacity was running through our ancestors millions of years ago, and it's still running through the chimpanzees in the forests of West Africa today. June: That bridge between us and them is not metaphorical. It is biological. Which brings me to our second thread — the shared recipe. June: Earlier this year, the results of the largest genetic study of chimpanzees ever conducted were published — and it is a landmark piece of science. Researchers analyzed the genomes of hundreds of chimpanzees from across sub-Saharan Africa, representing all four recognized subspecies. And what they found is extraordinary in its detail. June: First, let's just pause on what that means — sequencing hundreds of chimp genomes. We're talking about reading the entire instruction manual of hundreds of individual lives, and then comparing those manuals to find the differences and the similarities. It's an astonishing amount of data. June: What the study revealed was how chimpanzees have adapted — genetically — to the wildly different environments they inhabit. Chimps live in rainforests. They live in dry savannas. They live at altitude. And their genomes reflect those different environments in ways that are specific and traceable. You can look at a chimpanzee's D N A and see the fingerprints of the habitat its ancestors lived in, the diseases they survived, the pressures they adapted to. June: One of the most striking findings was around disease resistance — particularly around malaria and other pathogens. Chimpanzees carry versions of genes that in humans are associated with immune function, and the study found clear signs of positive selection around those genes in certain chimp populations. Meaning: the individuals who had certain variants of those genes survived and reproduced more. Evolution, in action, written in the genome. June: Now here's where it connects back to us in a way that I find genuinely humbling. Humans and chimpanzees share somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of our D N A. That number gets quoted a lot, but I think we don't always feel what it means. What it means is that the instruction set — the biological recipe — for building a chimpanzee is almost identical to the recipe for building a human. June: The same genes that govern our immune systems, our brain development, our social bonding, our emotional regulation — versions of those same genes are running in chimpanzees. When researchers look at the genes involved in chimp adaptation, they are looking at the same gene families we carry. The differences that make us human are real, and they matter, but they are written in the margins of a document that is almost entirely shared. June: The new chimp genomics study matters for another reason too — conservation. When you have detailed genetic data across all four subspecies, you can identify which populations are most genetically distinct, most irreplaceable. You can see where diversity is highest, and where it's being lost. That kind of data becomes a roadmap for protecting what cannot be recovered once it's gone. June: Because here's the thing about genetic diversity — it's not just a number. It's resilience. It's the toolkit a species carries for surviving the unexpected — new diseases, new climates, new pressures. When a population shrinks, it loses diversity. And when it loses diversity, it loses options. Understanding that in chimpanzees isn't just interesting science. It's urgent science. June: And that urgency leads me directly into our third thread today — because this one is hard, and it's real, and I think it needs to be heard. June: Borneo. Right now. As I'm recording this, fires are spreading across the Indonesian part of Borneo — and the Bornean orangutan, one of our closest great ape relatives, is running out of forest to flee to. June: Mongabay, which does some of the most careful environmental journalism in the world, has been tracking this. And the picture they're painting is devastating. Orangutans are not fast animals. They're not built for sudden evacuation. They live slow, deliberate lives — deeply dependent on large, connected tracts of forest. They need old-growth trees for sleeping, for fruit, for raising their young. A female orangutan will spend seven or eight years raising a single infant. Seven or eight years. That's a longer childhood dependency than almost any other animal on Earth, except us. June: And what fires do — what deforestation does — is fragment the landscape. It turns a continuous forest into a patchwork of islands. And orangutans can't swim between islands. They can't cross open ground safely. So they get trapped. They stay in shrinking patches of forest as the fires close in, or they venture into agricultural land and end up in conflict with people — sometimes fatally. June: This isn't a hypothetical future scenario. This is happening now. The Bornean orangutan is critically endangered. The population has dropped by more than fifty percent over the last sixty years. Let me say that again. More than half of the Bornean orangutans that existed in living memory are gone. June: And at the same time — and this is something I want to make sure we acknowledge — there is a separate crisis unfolding on social media. The World Wildlife Fund has flagged a significant surge in primate trafficking, driven in part by people seeing baby primates in videos online, thinking they're adorable — which they are — and wanting one. What those videos don't show is that to get a baby primate, you almost always have to kill the mother. The primate trafficking trade and the deforestation crisis are connected. Both strip wild populations of individuals they cannot afford to lose. June: But I don't want to end on despair. Because there are people out there — rangers, scientists, veterinarians, local community members — who are working every single day to pull this back from the edge. There are orangutan rehabilitation centers in Borneo where rescued animals are cared for and, when possible, returned to the wild. There are legal frameworks being strengthened. There is science — like that chimp genomics study — that is directly informing conservation decisions. June: And there's something else I keep coming back to. The research on chimpanzee communication, the genetic studies, the conservation work — all of it is being done by people who looked at another primate and recognized something. A mind. A family. A stake in what happens next. June: That recognition — that moment of seeing yourself in another creature — is maybe the most important thing we have going for us. Because you can't protect what you don't know. And you can't love what you can't see. June: So that's what this show is for. To help us see. June: We carry 98 to 99 percent of the same D N A as a chimpanzee. We share a common ancestor with every primate alive today. We belong to the same order — Primates — and we share the same basic biological recipe: the same bones, the same social hungers, the same capacity for attachment and grief and play and problem-solving. That's not poetry. That's biology. And biology is telling us, plainly, that we are family. June: Intelligence is not ours alone. Feeling is not ours alone. The world we're trying to protect is not ours alone either. Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — and by every person who's ever watched a chimpanzee and felt, for just a moment, recognized. June: If this episode meant something to you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone you think would love it. The more of us who are paying attention, the better for all of us — and for them. You'll find links to the studies and stories we talked about today in the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you next time on Kindred Minds.