Chimps strike stones against trees as communication, study suggests
phys.org
phys.org
We humans are animals, nothing less, nothing more. We are animals with big brains, sure, but nothing of importance sets us apart from other animals.
To me, this whole idea of “human exceptionalism” has simply no plausibility, both from a biological and a philosophical standpoint.
It doesn’t take more than a few seconds of observation of even most insects to see there is thought and at the very least feelings of self preservation there.
The human computer increases its power differently than the accepted mythology suggests. First, the human computer it not an individual brain, it's the entire society with its structure and inter generational transfer of knowledge. The communication between individual "nodes" is part of the structure and the intelligence of the system.
We are largely past the myth of intelligent design, will soon be past the myth of unique sentience, and at some point will realize that the myth of individual exceptionalism is also largely a myth. A genius placed outside of society would be unable to achieve anything.
The way we seem to get past these myths is simply acquiring more computational power through population growth and better communication. Once a certain threshold of computational power is reached a new transformational idea will appear. It's pretty much accepted that if Marconi wasn't around to "invent" the radio, someone else would (indeed, almost every country has a claim to such an inventor). These things are part of the zeitgeist, and it seems that "zeitgeist" is sort of similar to "next token prediction" in many ways.
I am sure that these thoughts will be deeply unpopular, but I am starting to see them more and more. Our working model of the world is shifting.
I am positive that there's an early-90's Sugarcubes song with the lyrics "bangs a tree with a rock."
Watching chimpanzees throw stones into trees feels less like a primitive gesture and more like a signal—a pulse across time. Not just a message to others nearby, but a mark etched into the sensory fabric of the forest.
Maybe what we call “language” is just the tip of a deeper communicative iceberg. Beneath it lie rhythm, vibration, and shared attention. And that’s not exclusive to humans.
Instead of asking whether chimp signals “count” as language, maybe we should ask why our definition of language is still so narrow.
Transposed into the world of radio, this approach is known as "ultrawideband" or "time domain radio".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_drum
https://time.com/archive/6771186/science-drum-telegraphy/ 01942: "Any pulp writer worth his salt knows that when his locale is darkest Africa he can’t use too many drums. In a good standard plot, talking drums warn fierce natives of the unsuspecting white man’s approach while the reader shudders. Last week in Natural History Dr. Albert Irwin Good, who understands Bulu and related African dialects, published the first popular article on the linguistics of drums, the complicated telegraphy whereby African drummers talk across the jungle."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1945.11... 01945: Drum-signaling in a West African Tribe, by George Herzog. "The use of musical instruments for purposes of signaling is very widespread, and definite systems of communication are or were based on it in native Africa, Middle and South America, and the Pacific. The African systems are the most elaborate and often serve for free conversation; their existence is well known to the anthropologist and the traveler, hut they have been little investigated from the linguistic point of view, and still less in their social setting."
https://pen.org/drums-that-talk/ (Gleick?) "For a long time Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa had no idea. In fact they had no idea that the drums conveyed information at all. In their own cultures, in special cases a drum could be an instrument of signaling, along with the bugle and the bell, used to transmit a small set of messages: attack; retreat; come to church. But they could not conceive of talking drums. (...) That result was a technology much sought in Europe: long-distance communication faster than any traveler on foot or horseback. Through the still night air over a river, the thump of the drum could carry six or seven miles. Relayed from village to village, messages could rumble a hundred miles or more in a matter of an hour."
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/50p1b7/til_t... "I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Nigeria and as a result of learning to play the drums I happened to pick up the talking drums as well and even though my spoken Yoruba is absolutely horrendous now (I can still understand), I can still speak Yoruba with the talking drums."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT3tIJzAkcc a short message with a transcription
I've noticed a bit of resistance in Western cultures when I bring this up. People tend to think of Africa as "primitive", and there's some cognitive dissonance when you realize Africa had the world's most sophisticated communications system.
I'm not making this claim lightly either. They had a start/end signals, a "header" with an address, and a message payload, repeated for error-correction. There was also a whole routing and QoS system, albeit done manually.
> The TRB introduced farming and husbandry as major food sources to the pottery-using hunter-gatherers north of this line. (...) Although they were largely of Early European Farmer (EEF) descent, people of the Funnelbeaker culture had a relatively high amount of hunter-gatherer admixture, particularly in Scandinavia, suggesting that hunter-gatherer populations were partially incorporated into it during its expansion into this region.[7] People of the Funnelbeaker culture often had between 30% and 50% hunter-gatherer ancestry depending on the region. (...) In the early 3rd millennium BCE, the Corded Ware culture appeared in Northern Europe. Its peoples were of marked steppe-related ancestry and traced their origins in cultures further east. This period is distinguished by the construction of numerous defensive palisades in Funnelbeaker territory, which may be a sign of violent conflict between the Funnelbeakers, Corded Ware, and Pitted Ware.[13] By 2650 BCE, the Funnelbeaker culture had been replaced by the Corded Ware culture. (...)
> In Frydenlund, Funen, Denmark, the grinding stones were used to grind wild plants only. In Oldenburg, Germany, grain was processed. In Frydenlund, the absence of cereal grinding combined and an abundance of carbonised cereals from soil samples indicates that probably grain was processed to a porridge-like meal.[18] In Oldenburg, in contrast, bread (possible flat bread) was produced in addition to porridge.[20][16] (...)
> The Funnel Beaker Culture is associated with skilfully crafted objects such as flint axes or battle axes.
> At Flintbek in northern Germany cart tracks dating from c. 3400 BCE were discovered underneath a megalithic long barrow. This is the earliest known direct evidence for wheeled vehicles in the world (i.e. not models or images).[25][26][27][28]
Meanwhile, in Africa:
> In a 2013 study based on radiocarbon dates, the accession of Hor-Aha, the second king of the First Dynasty, was placed between 3111 and 3045 BC with 68% confidence, and between 3218 and 3035 with 95% confidence.[3] The same study placed the accession of Den, the sixth king of the dynasty, between 2928 and 2911 BC with 68% confidence,[3] although a 2023 radiocarbon analysis placed Den's accession potentially earlier, between 3011 and 2921, within a broader window of 3104 to 2913.[4] (...)
> Information about this dynasty is derived from a few monuments and other objects bearing royal names, the most important being the Narmer Palette and Narmer Macehead, as well as Den and Qa'a king lists.[5][6][7] No detailed records of the first two dynasties have survived, except for the terse lists on the Palermo Stone. (...) Egyptian hieroglyphs were fully developed by then, and their shapes would be used with little change for more than three thousand years.
No wheels, though; those were probably an Indo-European invention.
I think it's probably a mistake to try to make general statements about all of Africa. The majority of human cultural and genetic diversity is found in Africa, so generalizations about Africans are somewhat similar to generalizations about non-elephant mammals.
This highlights another important bias when viewing African history through the lens of Western culture. Talking drums are likely much much older, but oral history gets ignored, and the "official" history is really just the first time a European wrote it down.
It's also worth noting that there is strong indication that pre-colonial states in subsaharan africa well outside the horn of africa did keep written language for the purposes of managing bureaucracies. Hell, arabic was adopted in east africa many centuries before europeans ever set foot there. The technology was certainly not unknown. However, if indeed this was the case, it clearly did not spread far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy, nor was it likely used for what we would now call private commerce, and we have no surviving records showing the scripts.
> It's also worth noting that there is strong indication that pre-colonial states in subsaharan africa well outside the horn of africa did keep written language for the purposes of managing bureaucracies. (...) The technology was certainly not unknown. However, if indeed this was the case, it clearly did not spread far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy. However, if indeed this was the case, it clearly did not spread far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy, nor was it likely used for what we would now call private commerce, and we have no surviving records showing the scripts.
This is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu_Manuscripts explains:
> Timbuktu Manuscripts, or Tombouctou Manuscripts, is a blanket term for the large number of historically significant manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in private households in Timbuktu, a city in northern Mali. The collections include manuscripts about art, medicine, philosophy, and science, as well as copies of the Quran.[6] Timbuktu manuscripts are the most well known set of West African manuscripts. (...) Some 350,000 manuscripts were transported to safety, and 300,000 of them were still in Bamako in 2022.
> The dates of the manuscripts range between the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e., from the Islamisation of the Mali Empire until the decline of traditional education in French Sudan).[11] Their subject matter ranges from scholarly works to short letters. (...)
> Scribes in Timbuktu translated imported works of numerous well-known individuals (such as Plato, Hippocrates, and Avicenna) as well as reproducing a "twenty-eight volume Arabic language dictionary called The Mukham, written by an Andalusian scholar in the mid-eleventh century."[15]: 25 Original books were also written by local authors, covering subjects such as history, religion, law, philosophy and poetry. (...)
> Some manuscripts contain instructions on nutrition and therapeutic properties of desert plants, whilst others debate matters such as "polygamy, moneylending, and slavery."[15]: 27 The manuscripts include "catalogues of spells and incantations; astrology; fortune-telling; black magic; necromancy, or communication with the dead by summoning their spirits to discover hidden knowledge; geomancy, or divining markings on the ground made from tossed rocks, dirt, or sand; hydromancy, reading the future from the ripples made from a stone cast into a pool of water; and other occult subjects..."[15]: 27 A volume titled Advising Men on Sexual Engagement with Their Women acted as a guide on aphrodasiacs and infertility remedies, as well as offering advice on "winning back" their wives.
This is far beyond the needs of centralized bureaucracy, and substantial numbers of records do survive despite the best efforts of Boko Haram.
My point more broadly is that prevalence of an oral tradition doesn't imply the lack of capacity to develop a written one. As Timbuktu is perfect evidence of—their libraries coexisted (and still do today) with griots, and the two repositories of knowledge seem to serve distinct functions in society.
Probably because it is not considered to be reliable. For example, "hearsay" is inadmissible as evidence in court.
Google: "The practice of using church bell signals to call people to worship and mark time is widely attributed to Paulinus of Nola, a Bishop of Nola in Campania, Italy, around AD 400. He is credited with introducing the first church bells into the Christian Church."
Church bells can be heard for miles.
Similarly, Archimedes had mirrors, even if he may not have burned ships with them, so he could have invented the heliotrope or heliograph, but in fact that had to wait for Gauss.
The first telegraph relay system in Europe used a semaphore system similar to the British Navy's, but it wasn't deployed until 01792: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph At that point the relaying of drum messages over long distances through many stations was already practiced in parts of Africa.
It's a bit hard for me to imagine drums working in medieval Europe. I don't think they would propagate as well as the sound of church bells. Heck, I could identify church bells from miles away, nothing else carries like that. Outdoor concerts don't seem to carry far at all, for example.
As with most discussions, the nuance matters. Anecdotal evidence is trumped by science.
Drums tend to have lower frequencies than church bells. All else equal, lower frequencies generally travel farther because they have longer wavelengths (less diffraction means they can go around objects better), less attenuation, and less absorption.
As an example of the application of low frequency long distance communication in nature, elephants use sub-sonic (to humans) frequencies to communicate many kilometers away.
Generally lower frequency sounds are less attenuated by air, and they diffract better around obstacles, and drums are better at producing low-frequency sounds. So I'd think that drums would carry better than bells over many kilometers.
Communication translated:
“You see this stone? Get any closer and you’re next, Timmy. Seriously. I’m in no kind of mood to be messed with today.”
I distinctly remember reading an an animal above newspaper column 30 years ago where the author considered the person absurd for suggesting her dog gets mad and she leaves and pees on the furniture out of spite.
Nowadays we have dogs talking using buttons and expressing all kind of complex emotions.
https://planetclaire.tv/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/rocks.mp3
I do believe that such a statement won't stand the test of time.
Hell, we use "design language" even if it's clearly not language; i see little reason why this should be different. And of course the rest of the non-verbal chomsky hierarchy has little relation to how most folks use the word (hell, I bet most coders can't even tell you what a regular language is despite using regular expressions).
But, particularly when it comes to stuff like bird song, it shows a lot of features of syntax. I just don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater arguing over what to call it.