Orangutans Can Beatbox, Scientists Discover

Our red-headed primate cousins, the orangutans, might be more similar to us vocally than we first thought.

According to a paper published in the journal PNAS Nexus on June 27, orangutans have been discovered to be able to make two different sounds with their voices simultaneously, in much the same way as human beatboxers and songbirds.

"Humans use the lips, tongue, and jaw to make the unvoiced sounds of consonants, while activating the vocal folds in the larynx with exhaled air to make the voiced, open sounds of vowels," Adriano Lameira, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. "Orangutans are also capable of producing both types of sounds—and both at once."

"For example, large male orangutans in Borneo will produce noises known as "chomps" in combination with "grumbles" in combative situations. Female orangutans in Sumatra produce "kiss squeaks" at the same time as "rolling calls" to alert others of a possible predator threat."

"The fact that two separate populations of orangutans were observed making two calls simultaneously, is proof that this is a biological phenomenon."

Beatboxing works by using the lips, vocal folds, tongue and velum at the back of the throat to mimic percussion instruments, often creating sounds not usually made in the person's spoken language.

"Humans rarely produce voiced and voiceless noises simultaneously. The exception is beatboxing, a skilled vocal performance which mimics the complex beats of hip hop music," co-author and independent researcher Madeleine Hardus said in the statement.

"But the very fact that humans are anatomically able to beatbox, raises questions about where that ability came from. We know now the answer could lie within the evolution of our ancestors."

The researchers discovered this strange simultaneous-noise phenomenon after watching nearly 4,000 hours of footage of two populations of vocalizing orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra, finding that primates within both groups were capable of making two noises at once.

In another paper published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences in February, Lameira suggested that the consonant-like calls of primates may have evolved as a result of the animals' arboreal lifestyle and extractive foraging, and are a precursor to speech as we know it.

The authors hope that this research will help us piece together the evolution of human speech, and how we developed human beatboxing.

"Now that we know this vocal ability is part of the great ape repertoire, we can't ignore the evolutionary links," Lameira said.

"It could be possible that early human language resembled something that sounded more like beatboxing, before evolution organized language into the consonant–vowel structure that we know today."

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about orangutans? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.