Deep in Uganda’s tropical rainforest, researcher Joseph Mine made a discovery that’s rewriting our understanding of how human language evolved millions of years ago. After studying a community of 60 chimpanzees and analyzing hundreds of hours of footage, Mine found that young chimps learn their complex vocal and visual communication patterns primarily from their mothers and maternal relatives, just like human babies do. The chimps develop sophisticated combinations of sounds, gestures, facial expressions, and body movements that create a rich communication system, with each family showing distinct patterns that get passed down through generations.
What makes this discovery so groundbreaking is that chimps who share mothers develop similar communication styles, while those who share fathers show no such patterns, proving that these behaviors are learned rather than inherited genetically. Since young chimps spend most of their early years with their mothers, just like human children with their primary caregivers, this ability to learn communication socially may date back at least six million years to when humans and chimps shared a common ancestor. The research suggests that our remarkable human capacity for complex communication has much deeper evolutionary roots than anyone imagined. Scientists now believe this social learning of communication skills could be an ancient trait shared across ape species, showing that the foundations of human language were being built long before humans were even human.