Bonobos, our closest relatives, may not speak, but they use something strikingly similar to human language. A new study from researchers at the University of Zurich and Harvard University reveals that ...

An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives, and story summaries. Few apes ...

He wasn’t the first nonhuman primate to use symbols to communicate, but he was the first to do so with such fluency, subtlety and apparent ease that it prompted uncomfortable questions about the ...

Humans are not the only species to combine concepts to build more complex meaning, a new study found. Bonobo chimpanzees combine calls in a manner similar to how humans structure words to make phrases ...

Bonobos—our closest living relatives—create complex and meaningful combinations of calls resembling the word combinations of ...

Bonobos are our closest living relatives along with chimpanzees, both sharing around 98.8 percent of their DNA with humans.