ArticleNature ecology & evolution2022
Sociality predicts orangutan vocal phenotype.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Silence as an Overlooked Catalyzer for Primate Vocal Evolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2026Article
- How can we use social network analysis to better understand Chimpanzee and Gorilla sociality and communication?Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Generative vocal plasticity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2025Article
- Network indicators of cultural resilience to anthropogenic removals in animal societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Vocal Learning Versus Speech Evolution: Untangling a False Equivalence.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Social and individual factors mediate chimpanzee vocal ontogeny.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- What we know and don't know about great ape cultural communication in the wild.American journal of primatology · 2025Review
- Article
- Call combination production is linked to the social environment in Western Australian magpies (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Vocal convergence and social proximity shape the calls of the most basal Passeriformes, New Zealand Wrens.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Open plains are not a level playing field for hominid consonant-like versus vowel-like calls.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Optionality in animal communication: a novel framework for examining the evolution of arbitrariness.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2022Article
- Chimpanzee pant-hoots encode individual information more reliably than group differences.American journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Article
- Social orangutans have varied vocal personalities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Neighbors affect vocal behavior of tropical wrens: a multispeaker density-manipulation experiment.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In humans, individuals' social setting determines which and how language is acquired. Social seclusion experiments show that sociality also guides vocal development in songbirds and marmoset monkeys, but absence of similar great ape data has been interpreted as support to saltational notions for language origin, even if such laboratorial protocols are unethical with great apes. Here we characterize the repertoire entropy of orangutan individuals and show that in the wild, different degrees of sociality across populations are associated with different 'vocal personalities' in the form of distinct regimes of alarm call variants. In high-density populations, individuals are vocally more original and acoustically unpredictable but new call variants are short lived, whereas individuals in low-density populations are more conformative and acoustically consistent but also exhibit more complex call repertoires. Findings provide non-invasive evidence that sociality predicts vocal phenotype in a wild great ape. They prove false hypotheses that discredit great apes as having hardwired vocal development programmes and non-plastic vocal behaviour. Social settings mould vocal output in hominids besides humans.
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