After analyzing decades-old videos of captive chimpanzees, scientists have concluded that the animals could utter a human word: “mama.”

It’s not exactly the expansive dialogue in this year’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” But the finding, published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, may offer some important clues as to how speech evolved. The researchers argue that our common ancestors with chimpanzees had brains already equipped with some of the building blocks needed for talking.

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Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our species arose in Africa. Research on the DNA of living people has indicated that early Homo sapiens stayed on the continent for a long while, with a small group leaving just 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world.

But those findings have raised a puzzling question: Why did our species take so long to move beyond Africa?

Several new studies, including one published on Thursday, argue that the timeline was wrong. According to new data, several waves of modern humans began leaving the continent about 250,000 years ago.

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The Baishiya Karst Cave is not an easy place to call home. It is nestled on a steep rocky slope on the Tibetan Plateau, 10,700 feet up, where the oxygen is thin and the climate cold and dry.

But a series of expeditions to the cave in recent years have demonstrated that it was home to one of the most mysterious branches of humanity: a Neanderthal-like group of people called the Denisovans.

Since 2010, scientists have painted a murky picture of Denisovans (pronounced De-NEE-so-vans) based on just three teeth, a few bone fragments and traces of DNA. Mystery has shrouded much of their existence, especially their behavior.

Continue reading “How the Denisovans Survived the Ice Age” →