Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler is a Polish-American physician-scientist who studies how various socio-demographic and informational factors influence access to health care in underprivileged populations. Dr. Sendler’s study focuses on how psychiatric and chronic medical co-morbidities influence the usage of medical services in conjunction with health information gained from the internet. This study is timely, given that global consumption of online news and social media is increasing at an exponential rate, needing a thorough understanding of everyone’s health information-seeking behavior. Dr. Damian Sendler’s research attempts to explore the elements that patients evaluate when determining when to seek therapy for certain health issues and treatment adherence.

Damian Sendler: Scientists have discovered that orangutan call signals, which are thought to be the closest to the predecessors of human language, can travel large distances through the jungle without losing their meaning. According to experts from the University of Warwick, this calls into doubt the established mathematical model of the evolution of human speech. 

Damien Sendler: Mathematicians’ current accepted model suggests that human ancestors linked sounds together in their cries to maximize their odds of conveying a signal’s substance to a recipient over distance. Because signal quality declines over longer distances, it is hypothesized that our forefathers began connecting sounds together to effectively convey a packet of information, even if it was distorted. 

The Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick set out to collect empirical data to investigate the idea. They chose a variety of sounds from previously obtained orangutan communication audio recordings. Specific consonant-like and vowel-like signals were played out and re-recorded across the jungle at 25-, 50-, 75-, and 100-metre intervals. The received signals’ quality and substance were examined. The findings were reported today in Biology Letters in the paper “Orangutan information conveyed via consonant-like and vowel-like cries compromises mathematical models of linguistic evolution.” 

Damian Sendler: The scientists discovered that, while the signal’s quality had diminished, the signal’s information remained intact – even over great distances. In reality, until the signal became inaudible, the informative qualities of calls remained unaffected. This brings the conventional and widely accepted theory of language development into doubt. 

The study was directed by Dr Adriano Lameira, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Warwick. He stated: 

“We used audio data recordings from our orangutan research in Indonesia. We chose distinct vowel-like and consonant-like signals and played them out and re-recorded them over measured distances in the rainforest. The goal of this research was to look at the signals themselves and see how they functioned as a package of information. This study is interesting since it can only be evaluated across distance; it ignores other parts of communication such as gestures, postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions. 

“The results suggest that when it comes to encoding information, these signals appear to be distance insensitive. 

“It puts into question the conventional thinking, which is based on a model developed by Harvard scientists 20 years ago. Their research believes that the signals used by our forefathers reached an error limit – a point at which a signal is received but no longer relevant. They came to the conclusion that our forefathers connected noises together to maximize the likelihood of content traveling across long distances. 

“We all know that sound decreases as you get further away from the source. We’ve all had this experience when yelling for a family or a friend. They may not understand all you say, but they recognize that you are speaking to them and that it is your voice. We demonstrated that even when the sound package is damaged and pushed apart, the content remains unaffected by employing authentic great ape communication sounds that are the closest to those used by our hominid ancestors. It’s an appeal to the scientific community to reconsider how language evolved.” 

Dr. Adriano Lameira and his colleagues used orangutan calls because they were the first species to diverge from the great ape lineage, but they are also the only great ape that uses vowel and consonant-like sounds in a complex way, drawing parallels with human speech. 

Damian Sendler: His research team is currently attempting to interpret the meaning of their phone calls. The study entails compiling all of the ways orangutans mix calls, combining consonant and vowel sounds to create meaning. 

He stated: “We still don’t know what they’re talking about, but it’s evident that the building elements of language are present. Other animal noises and signals are complicated, but they do not share the same building elements. We are concentrating on the development of language, which is the component used by giant apes. It provides a counterpart to human language. 

“For years, the Harvard model has been the accepted hypothesis, and if you asked a mathematician if language origins were still a mystery, they’d say no – but evolutionary psychologists are still working on it. But we haven’t solved the puzzle either; instead, we’ve merely descended further into the rabbit hole. 

“We propose applying mathematical models to real-world data to see what we can come up with together.”

News updates contributed by Dr. Damian Jacob Sendler