Wild bonobos – our closest living relatives – communicate using vocal calls organized in compositionally complex semantic structures that mirror key features of human language, according to a new study. The findings challenge long-held assumptions about the uniqueness of human language and open new avenues for understanding the evolution of communication. A hallmark characteristic of human language is its ability to combine discrete elements to form more complex, meaningful structures. This principle, known as compositionality, allows for the assembly of morphemes (the smallest unit of language with meaning) into words and words into sentences; the meaning of the whole is determined by its constituent parts and their arrangement. Compositionality can take two forms: trivial and nontrivial. In trivial compositionality, each word maintains its independent meaning. Nontrivial compositionality involves a more complex, nuanced relationship where meaning is not simply a direct sum of the words involved. Compositionality may not be unique to human language; studies in birds and primates have demonstrated that some animals are capable of combining meaningful vocalizations into  trivially compositional strucutres. However, to date, there is no direct evidence that animals use nontrivial compositionality in their communication.

Here, Mélissa Berthet and colleagues report strong empirical evidence that wild bonobos (Pan paniscus) use nontrivial compositionality in their vocal communication. Berthet et al. analyzed 700 recordings of bonobo vocal calls and call combinations and documented over 300 contextual features associated with each utterance. Employing a method derived from distributional semantics – a linguistic framework that measures meaning similarities between words – the authors analyzed these contextual features to infer the meanings of individual bonobo vocalizations and quantify their relationships. Then, to assess whether bonobo call combinations follow compositional principles, they applied a multi-step approach previously used to identify compositionality in human communication. Berthet et al. discovered that bonobo call types integrate into four compositional structures, three of which exhibit non-trivial compositionality, suggesting that bonobo communication shares more structural similarities with human language than previously recognized.

Eventgoers’ live experiences are shaped by media technologies like social media, whether used in the moment or not, and memory and anticipation are increasingly part of live experiences themselves, research published in Cambridge University Press journal Memory, Mind & Media has found.

Goethe University Frankfurt has been awarded another humanities research unit funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG): The unit, titled “Power and Abuse in the Roman Catholic Church,” will investigate the conditions that facilitate abuse and how they can be prevented. Additionally, the Center for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences “Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities” has secured follow-up funding for its study of Christianity from the first to the eighteenth century.

The lifetime of some Norwegian appliances, like washing machines and ovens, has in fact decreased over the last decades, a new study says. But the reason is most probably due to consumer preferences and not because of “planned obsolescence.”

*Note – this is an early press release from the European Congress on Obesity in Malaga, Spain, 11-14 May. Please credit the congress when using this research.*

New research to be presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2025, Malaga, Spain, 11-14 May) suggests that weight loss programmes targeting a particular % weight loss are often failing, and that other factors should be considered including improvement of obesity-related complications, enhancing quality of life and overall physical and social functioning. The research is by an international team including Dr Sanjeev Sockalingam, Obesity Canada and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues.