Putty-nosed monkeys are smart little animals according to scientists. A group of them living in west Africa have proven what researchers are calling one of the first experimental demonstrations of rudimentary language ability in wild creatures. Though scientists already knew that the monkeys used varying warning calls to alert one another of predators, researcher Klaus Zuberbuhler recently discovered the animals are also capable of communiciating more information than originally thought, such as identifying themselves and indicating whether they intend to flee.

"In linguistics, 'morphemes' are usually defined as the smallest meaningful units in the grammar of a language. Our research revealed some interesting parallels in the vocal behaviour of forest monkeys and this feature of human language," he said.

According to Zuberbuhler, the two most common alarms used by the monkeys are "hacks" and "pyows," which they can use to warn one another of predators such as leopards ("pyow-pyow") and which dominant males use combinations of to relay information such as "I am about to travel, follow me."

"What we showed is that it was this call sequence alone that was sufficient to trigger group travel," Dr Zuberbühler said. "Most primates are limited in the number of signals they can physically produce due to their lack of tongue control. The only way to escape this constraint may be to combine the few calls they have into more complex sequences.

» The Independent