forwarded to the list from Jeff Nightbyrd

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Here a little item that I picked up from www.pravda.ru 
that made me feel good:

Nightbyrd
 
           APES COULD SPEAK, THOUGH THEY CANNOT 

Three families of anthropoid apes possess an important 
brain function connected with speech faculties. Earlier 
it was supposed this function to be exceptionally a human 
brain's prerogative. According to the BBC, investigators 
in a Georgia university, carried out a resonance-
magnetic scanning of chimpanzee, baboon and gorilla
brains. Now the scientists are sure nobody has 
investigated yet such an important structure of 
anthropoid apes' brain. If their discovery is 
corroborated, it will become one more important 
contribution to the evolution theory: it will be clear 
that early humans obtained the speech faculty before homo 
sapiens and other big primates' ways dispersed forever. 
In human brain there is the  so-called Brock zone, one
of whose components is called the Broadmann-44 zone. Namely 
this zone, situated mostly in the left cerebral hemisphere 
and partly in the right one, is responsible for forming 
speech. Claudio Cantalupo and William Hopkins from 
Georgia State University were puzzled with the fact 
that the apes also possessed this structure, though they 
could not speak. It is not clear for what functions the 
apes need this Brock zone, especially taking into account 
that the primitive anthropoid apes' "language" is not 
similar to complicated human speech. This could be 
explained only with the role gesticulation played in 
evolution of human speech. The anthropoid apes observed 
by the investigators most often gesticulated with their 
right hand, especially when they accompany their gestures 
with a kind of voice signals. If the scientists' theory 
is right, the left side of the zone-44 was gradually 
enlarging, while both human predecessors and anthropoid 
apes were learning to gesticulate and produce laryngeal 
sounds. Though later, by unknown reasons, human gestures 
and sounds grew into speech, while the apes' ones remained 
the same gestures forever.