An orangutan called Rocky could hold the secret to the origin of language

An orangutan called Rocky could hold the secret to the origin of language, after displaying an ability to emulate human speech.

The ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a “conversational context”.

Researchers conducted a game in which Rocky mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made vowel-like calls.Comparing Rocky's sounds against a large database of recordings of wild and captiveorangutans showed they were markedly different.

Rocky was able to learn new sounds and control the action of his voice in the way humans do when they conduct a conversation, the scientists concluded.

They believe Rocky could be the key to understanding how human speech evolved.

Lead researcher Dr Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, said: “It's not clear how spoken language evolved from the communication systems of the ancestral great apes.

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