Humans can tell what chimps are saying!

PARIS: Do you speak chimp? They are among our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, and new research published Wednesday shows that humans can tell when a chimpanzee is happy, sad, angry or scared -- simply by listening to their cries.

Proving a hypothesis first posed by Charles Darwin, researchers in the Netherlands found that humans were able to differentiate chimp cries depending on their context -- be that being tickled, threatened by a predator, or eating high-value food.

“We demonstrate for the first time that humans can accurately map other species vocalisations to specific behavioural contexts,” Roza Kamiloglu, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and lead study author, told AFP.

Kamiloglu and the team asked close to 3,500 participants to listen to recordings of 150 chimp sounds, then decide based on what they heard if the animal was in a positive or negative situation, and whether it was excited or relaxed. Around 300 participants were then asked to match sounds to a list of 10 behaviours, including chimps mating, being separated from their mothers, or being scared by something.