Johan Bolhuis, a neurobiologist at Utrecht University, remarks on how strange it must seem to an outsider for scientists to be comparing birdsong with human speech and language. “If we were looking for some kind of animal equivalent, wouldn’t we look to our closest relatives, the great apes?” he asks. “But the odd thing is, so many aspects of human speech acquisition are similar to the way that songbirds acquire their songs. In the great apes, there’s no equivalent at all.”
