Common characteristics of motor patterns were observed across the tasks between both infant chimpanzees and 1-year-old infants.
As the chimpanzees decided which objects were to be named and shown, they also incorporated many aspects of the teacher's role into their own behavior.
Particularly exciting are the new perspectives on early hominid language which have arisen from recent research on the linguistic competence of chimpanzee and bonobo.
We may well ask whether such elaborate vertical cultural transmission could occur at all if females were dispersing from natal groups, as happens among chimpanzees.
An additional suggestive observation is that the mirror system in chimpanzees corresponds to an area associated with language in humans.
There is no more reason to invoke a human model than a chimpanzee model, or neither.
But, it would fall far short of cross-fostering in which infant chimpanzees are maintained from birth under nearly human conditions.
In each case further along in the spectrum, one more human gene is inserted while the corresponding chimpanzee gene is deleted, if necessary.
