Coevolution of vocal communication and sociality in primates

Abstract

Understanding the rules that link communication and social behaviour is an essential prerequisite for discerning how a communication system as complex as human language might have evolved. The comparative method offers a powerful tool for investigating the nature of these rules, since it provides a means to examine relationships between changes in communication abilities and changes in key aspects of social behaviour over evolutionary time. Here we present empirical evidence from phylogenetically controlled analyses indicating that evolutionary increases in the size of the vocal repertoire among non-human primate species were associated with increases in both group size and time spent grooming (our measure of extent of social bonding).

Figure 1

Relationships between (a) contrasts in repertoire size and contrasts in group size and (b) contrasts in repertoire size and contrasts in grooming time. Repertoire size was square root transformed, group size was log transformed and percentage grooming time was log+1 transformed.