... We've Got Something to Say

Visit the monkey house at any zoo and it'd be hard to conclude that man's near relative has much to say. But researchers at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, writing in Nature last week, have concluded that monkeys do indeed use simple verbal communication. They observed male putty-nosed monkeys in Nigeria's Gashaka Gumti National Park and found the primates produced a series of calls containing two basic sounds to alert others to predators. "These calls were not produced randomly, and a number of distinct patterns emerged," says Kate Arnold, one of the researchers.

"Pyow" warned that a...