Marmoset Monkeys Give Each Other Names

By Shlomo Maital  

   Scientists continue to discover amazing things about primates.

    Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Ruth Schuster recounts how an Israeli scientist Dr. David Omer, and his student Guy Oren, published a study in Science journal, showing how, for the first time,  non-human primates give each other names, in their chatter.

     The marmoset is a really cute monkey native to Brazilian scrub-forests.  The scientists took two marmosets, put a barrier between them so they could not see one another —  and they exchanged calls, identifiable as ‘names’. 

      Linguist Noam Chomsky theorized that human verbal communication is unique to humans.  Turns out not to be so.  Elephants and marmosets and other species do not learn each other’s names because of their DNA – this is learned behavior, and what is learned, is taught.   Just as European ibis’s, thought extinct, have returned and teach their young how and where to migrate – learned behavior.  Elephants too make calls specific to individuals, similar to a name.  Dolphins call each other by name.  And fruit bats have linguistic abilities, with dialects.  And – they complain a lot, like us humans.

      One of our four children has protested to us, that he did not like the name we gave him – even though it is rather beautiful.  I wonder if marmosets too do this.  Like – “Fuzzball!?  You called me fuzzball?   Couldn’t you have called me something empowering, like King Kong?”