Have you ever walked past the baboon exhibit at your local zoo and thought, "That one with the big red butt sounds exactly like Uncle Harry!"? I haven't either (I don't have an Uncle Harry) but apparently some anthropologists did and it got them thinking about the origins of human speech. The result is a new study which suggests that the physical ability to talk existed 25 million years ago – long before the larynx developed but at a time when the tongue of human ancestors resembled that of the modern Guinea baboon. Language is a key difference between humans and the rest of the natural world, but the origin of our speech remains one of the greatest mysteries of science. In their study, Evidence of a Vocalic Proto-System in the Baboon (Papio papio) Suggests Pre-Hominin Speech Precursors, published in PLOS One, scientists from six universities in France and Alabama led by Dr. Louis-Jean Boe of Grenoble Alpes University listened to acoustics of 1,335 baboon sounds while analyzing the