Year: 2017

Recently, what seems like a whimsical question — Why can’t monkeys talk? — has turned into a serious and heated debate among former collaborators. In December, Fitch and colleagues published a paper in Science Advances that announced its counterpunch in the title: “Monkey vocal tracts are speech-ready.” On Friday, a pair of reports published in the same journal advanced the match to rounds three and four, with Lieberman’s reply and a response to his reply by Fitch and the other authors of the December study.

Recently, what seems like a whimsical question — Why can’t monkeys talk? — has turned into a serious and heated

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