Charades Anyone ?

Many of us know of charades as a fun game played with friends, but to new studies are now saying that orangutans use charade-like actions to communicate to each other and to humans themselves. The charades tactics used by the animals is a strong way to get signals across and getting specific meanings. When the orangutans use the pantomime with humans they usually just copy what they see them doing. For example, in the article it stated that the orangutans would see one of the researchers opening a coconut with a machete and seconds later the orangutans would try to use a stick to open the coconut the same exact way.

Orangutans are one of the most intelligent primates and this article is related to biology/science because these are animals and they are evolving into something that we never thought we would see. Evolution has been a mystery to man- kind, just how did it happen? But now we get to see first hand how language, the most important form of communication, might just of evolved in primates.

This article and topic is important to us because it "show abilities that are considered by some to be important in the evolution of language and that, to this point, have been considered uniquely human". The orangutans use the language to communicate to each other with motions signaling things like, " help me" ,"get that leaf" , or even "eat this ". Not only would these primates develop their own language but they would also be a step behind ours.