Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

Study, Methods, and AI Ideas

• Commenters highlight that the core contribution is mapping bonobo calls to contexts, creating a “semantic cloud” of call types; main work is painstaking field data collection, not exotic computation.
• Some suggest using modern language models to decode animal communication from large multimodal datasets (audio + behavior + environment).
• Others warn this could contaminate evidence: pattern-finding models might “hallucinate” structure and compositionality that isn’t really there.

Communication vs Language

• Strong emphasis that “communication” is widespread in animals, but “language” is usually defined more narrowly: structured, combinatorial, often recursively compositional.
• Debate over whether animal systems like bee dances, dolphin/crow communication, or pet behavior qualify as language or merely rich signaling.
• Several argue we don’t actually know that animals lack recursion, abstraction, or descriptive communication; evidence is incomplete.

Human Uniqueness and Archiving Knowledge

• One large subthread argues that humans are distinguished by storing information for future generations (writing, symbolic art, oral epics).
• Pushback: writing is very recent; many complex societies (and almost all of human history) relied on oral tradition. This suggests the key difference is cognitive/neurological, not writing per se.
• Others frame human distinctiveness in terms of recursion, prefrontal synthesis, large-scale social organization beyond Dunbar’s number, or efficient cultural transmission, not any single trait.

Syntax, Compositionality, and Example Choices

• Some linguistically informed comments question whether the reported bonobo “syntax” is truly non‑trivial compositionality versus arbitrary multi-call signs.
• Discussion of how human syntax is hierarchical/recursive, not just sequential, and how that differs from simple call concatenation.
• Extended side-debate over the article’s human-language examples (“blonde dancer” vs “bad dancer”), what counts as compositional, and whether the word choice is socially loaded.

Definitions, Anthropocentrism, and Evolution

• Several criticize the article’s claim that bonobos don’t have “language” because language is “the human communication system,” calling this circular and anthropocentric.
• Others note that similar abilities in chimps and bonobos don’t prove a 7‑million‑year-old ancestral syntax; convergent evolution remains possible.
• Some expect “goalpost moving”: as animal capacities look more language-like, definitions of “language” may be tightened to preserve human uniqueness.