MACAQUES may just seem to be indulging in monkey chatter, but they can distinguish one another’s voices in much the same way as we recognise those of other people.
In the human brain, the “voice region” in the auditory cortex activates when we hear others speak. It had been unclear if the voice region was a specialist adaptation, unique to humans, that evolved with our spoken language skills.
Now Chris Petkov at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues have found that monkey brains also have a voice region.
They played a variety of…
