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| Indonesia Crested Black Macaque, Sulawesi Crested Macaque, or the Black Ape Dominant male in group Settling down after deciding that there is no threat present July 9, 2006 Habitat: Tangkoko National Park. Wikipedia commons |
MONKEY BUSINESS
Good afternoon friends!
How as everything been for all of you this past week? For myself and my husband it has been a week of adjusting and learning. Greg’s stroke was so mild but still there are things that are different. The biggest for him is learning to speak well again, to annunciate his words loud and clear. Other than that wonderful news, I have some else: My second book in the series Sign of the Oth is at the publishers as I type away here. The Golden Strand of Shinar should be available on Amazon by February 12th or 13th. I am so excited to see all my hard work finally in print! May all of you enjoy it! And if you haven’t watched the video trailer on youTube, check it out while you are waiting; just go to youtube and type in the search bar the title of the book then click on the image of the boy on a horse. O you can just type my name in to youtube and it will come up. Let me know what you think! |
| Indochina rhesus macaque. Wikipedia commons |
Speaking of speech articulation, it has long been thought that monkeys cannot speak like humans because they didn’t possess the correct vocal cords. This concept started in 1969 when Philip Lieberman did a study on a dead rhesus macaque (native to Asia). He dissected the vocal tract and proclaimed that from his examination, monkeys do not possess the correct vocal cords and thus are incapable of producing essential vowel sounds.
Since then, “…a team led by Princeton neuroscientist Asif Ghazanfar, who worked with Lieberman in the past, has
obtained fresh information about a monkey’s potential vocal repertoire through X-ray video of a living monkey’s voice box. ‘What you'll find in the textbooks is that monkeys can't talk because they don't have the appropriate vocal tract to do so,’ explains Tecumseh Fitch, lead author of the study. ‘That, I think, is a myth. My colleagues and I all get
very tired of seeing this. But you see it in all the textbooks. Lots of popular books, and also scholarly books about the evolution of language, assume that in order to evolve speech we had to have massive changes in our vocal tract.’ … Fitch and company recorded the (monkey) sounds and used video fluoroscopy (a type of X-ray) to capture the corresponding movements of tongue, lips, and voice box on film. Computer analysis, correlating vocal tract movements with the sounds, showed that monkeys can produce all the clearly distinguishable vowel sounds needed to imitate human speech. Though consonants are not considered language limiting for nonhuman primates, the study also found that macaques are easily able to produce sufficient consonant sounds to talk up a storm.” They even used computer
simulations to synthesize how a monkey would sound if they spoke human words, and the words were very understandable.
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| Japanese Macaques |
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| Bonnett macaque |
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| Wetzone macaque, Sir Lanka |
So why don’t monkeys speak like humans. “The reason lies in the way the monkey brain and vocal tracts are wired. A monkey lacks language-critical connections between its auditory cortex and its motor cortex. These are the parts of the brain that process what is heard and generate instructions controlling voluntary muscle movements. Therefore, even though a monkey hears what we are saying, it
cannot convert that sound into instructions for its “speech-ready” vocal tract to imitate what it hears. A monkey also lacks the direct connections between the voice box and tongue that we use to shape our sounds into words.”
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| Stump-tailed macaques, South Asia and India |
Now evolutionists have to rewire their thinking; from our supposed ape-like ancestors only being able to grunt because they didn’t possess the ability for speech to one where vocal tract limitations are due to the wiring in a monkey’s brain. A much more difficult process to try to prove as transitional.
Look for next weeks blog to see what kind of words monkeys actually speak!
Until then, God bless and take care,
Willow Dressel
References:
https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/what-makes-us-human/what-would-a-monkey-say-if-it-had-a-mind-to/?utm_source=articlesmedia&utm_medium=email&utm_content=featurebutton&utm_campaign=20170121&mc_cid=8e45fbcbeb&mc_eid=ec76e61712
All Photos courtesy of Wikipedia commons:
Bonnet_macaque_(Macaca_radiata)_Photograph_By_Shantanu_Kuveskar.jpg (354 × 600 pixels, file size: 161 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
Jigokudani_hotspring_in_Nagano_Japan_001.jpg (800 × 600 pixels, file size: 130 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
- At Haggala Forest by Dmitry Arun
Indonesia Crested Black Macaque, Sulawesi Crested Macaque, or the Black Ape Dominant male in group Settling down after deciding that there is no threat present July 9, 2006 Habitat: Tangkoko National Park <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lipkee/616636478">www.flickr.com/photos/lipkee/616636478</a> _Q0S0758
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