Male bonobos have an impressive ability to detect when females are most fertile, even though the usual visual cues are unreliable. Researchers tracking wild bonobos in the Congo discovered that males ...

Bonobos—our closest living relatives—create complex and meaningful combinations of calls resembling the word combinations of humans. The study has investigated the vocal behavior of wild bonobos in ...

The bonobo (Pan paniscus), humanity’s closest cousin, appears to communicate in a way scientists believed was exclusive to humans. Researchers from the University of Zürich and Harvard University said ...

Mia, a young bonobo female from the Fekako community, vocalizing in response to distant group members.Image Credit: Martin Surbeck, Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project Humans are adept combiners. As it ...

A lot of human society requires what’s called a “theory of mind”—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We ...

Great apes appear to build friendships much like humans do. By studying grooming behavior, researchers discovered that chimpanzees and bonobos form close inner circles along with wider networks of ...

How old is language? A new study from researchers at the University of Zurich and Harvard University reveals that bonobos, our closest living relatives alongside chimpanzees, use the equivalent of ...

Humans can effortlessly talk about an infinite number of topics, from neuroscience to pink elephants, by combining words into sentences. This is thanks to compositionality: the ability to combine ...

Bonobos, one of humanity’s closest relatives, appear to string together vocal calls in ways that mirror a key feature of the human language, a new study carried out in the forests of the Democratic ...