4 ms·
Birdbrain: How Smart are Parrots?
- a-priori 18y agoThat's a surprisingly good overview of research into animal language. I don't find it surprising at all that animals like birds, and especially primates, can learn rudimentary human language. It's reasonable to assume they label things in their natural setting. In a social species, there would be an evolutionary advantage for one member to be able to describe, for example, that they just found a new banana tree. We're not special enough for language to have developed from scratch in homo sapiens. Our expressive language had to have come from simpler roots in other species. The thing about the bird making and using tools was new to me, however. I had only heard of primates using tools before.