Chantek, a 39-year-old male orangutan known around the world for his ability to use American Sign Language to communicate, has died at Zoo Atlanta. The zoo announced it was treating Chantek for ...

In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting sounds. At first, these calls may seem like a random collection of noises—but my rhythmic analyses reveal a different story. Those ...

Editor's Note: The original version of this story misstated the journal that Lameira's team's findings were published in; they were published in Nature Ecology ...

(via SciShow) One of the classic things that people say makes humans special is, well, the language we use to say we're special. But new research suggests that some of our evolutionary cousins might ...

One of the most persistent mysteries about our own species' evolution is the development of complex language. How we managed to move from making simple grunts to advanced sentences in which we can now ...

Researchers have discovered that orangutans possess vocal abilities similar to beatboxing, where they can produce two different sounds simultaneously. The study suggests that these vocal abilities in ...

Human language, in its many current forms, may owe an evolutionary debt to our distant ape ancestors who sounded off in groups of scattered individuals. Wild orangutans’ social worlds mold how they ...

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Orangutans, with their expressive eyes and human-like behaviors, ...