When a chimpanzee screams, what do you hear?

WWhen you listen to a jungle monkey cry through the canopy, what do you hear? If a chimpanzee is responsible for the cacophony, it may trigger an ancient form of recognition, flickering beneath your awareness.

These are the conclusions of a new study led by researchers at the University of Geneva: they observed that chimpanzee cries light up pockets of a special voice-sensitive region of the human brain, known as the temporal vocal area (TVA), which was previously thought to respond only to the voices of our species. The results suggest that some voice recognition abilities may be shared between species and predate human language.

“When participants heard chimpanzee vocalizations, this response was clearly distinct from that elicited by bonobos or macaques,” Leonardo Ceravolo, study co-author and neuroscientist at the University of Geneva, said in a statement.

Four species of primates were selected for the study: humans, chimpanzees, bonobos and rhesus macaques. Ceravolo and his colleagues collected 18 vocalizations from each of four monkeys and presented them randomly to 23 human participants, asking listeners to play a sort of auditory guessing game, identifying which species was behind each cry. They also monitored participants’ brains with MRI scans while they listened and analyzed the calls using statistical modeling to understand how they differed acoustically.

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Participants’ brains lit up when processing chimpanzee calls, with their TVA regions responding more readily to chimpanzee sounds than to those of other non-human primates. The researchers also found that the positive social calls of chimpanzees, but not bonobos, most closely resembled acoustically positive human voices. The findings echo previous research suggesting that the communication patterns of bonobos, our more peace-loving evolutionary cousins, evolved separately over time, even though we are as genetically close to bonobos as we are to chimpanzees.

Primate vocalizations consisted of single calls or sequences of calls and included both threat and distress calls and positive social calls. The 15 chimpanzee individuals were recorded in the wild in Budongo Forest, Uganda, while the 10 bonobo individuals were recorded in the wild in Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The 16 rhesus macaques were recorded in the wild among semi-free-living monkeys on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico.

Previous studies have examined how the human brain responds to the calls of primates and cats, but so far no research has observed species-specific responses in human VAT, the researchers point out. Future work could tease out the acoustic fingerprints that distinguish chimpanzee calls from those of bonobos.

“We already knew that certain areas of the animal brain responded specifically to the voices of their peers,” Ceravolo added. “But here we show that a region of the adult human brain, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, is also sensitive to non-human vocalizations.”

It seems that the call of the wild is still deeply ingrained in the human brain.

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Main image: Fabrom / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 5, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.