The Origins of Language: What Can Our Primate Cousins Teach Us?

Session 3: Animal
Intelligence Moderator: Nalini Anantharaman (Collège de France)

Abstract

Since nonhuman primates are our closest relatives in evolutionary history, studying their communication systems can help us identify traits shared with speech in our common ancestors. While primatologists argue that speech evolved from vocal communication, an alternative theory is beginning to gain traction within the scientific community. This so-called “gestural” theory emphasizes the fundamental role of our ancestors’ gestural communication in the evolutionary roots of language. In this lecture, I will present the results of our research conducted over the past twenty years with monkeys, both in the wild and in zoos, as well as our recent work combining an ethological approach with a developmental approach and non-invasive MRI brain imaging. These results may reveal that certain fundamental properties of language have a gestural—rather than vocal—origin.

Adrien Meguerditchian

As part of the broader quest to understand the origins of language, Adrien Meguerditchian studies communication among our primate cousins using a comparative approach with humans. A biologist by training, he conducted his first observations of baboons under the guidance of Jacques Vauclair, a professor of psychology at Aix-Marseille University. After completing his dissertation in late 2009, a Fyssen fellowship took him to study wild chimpanzees in Senegal—thanks to American anthropologist Jill Pruetz—and to Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked in primatologist William Hopkins’s laboratory to study chimpanzee communication and its links to brain structures using MRI brain images. In late 2012, Funding from the National Research Agency (ANR) enabled him to return to France and establish his research group in Marseille at the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory (which became the CRPN in 2024) within the “Comparative Cognition” team led by Joël Fagot, first on a contract basis and then as a CNRS researcher in 2014. He was subsequently awarded an ERC grant in 2016, the CNRS Paoletti Prize in 2017, and the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2021.