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301with all their communicative skills that they are extremely happy that their master hasfinally made the best decision of the day. This is another well-known outcome ofevolutionary "asynchrony" of the origins of sound perception and voice production: manyanimals (e.g., cats, dogs, horses, apes) can distinguish spoken signals and react to them,but they cannot produce articulated sounds themselves. Kanzi, a bonobo, a smaller andmuch more peaceful relative of the chimpanzee who puzzled many defenders of humanuniqueness, successfully proved that he can react not only to simple speech signals (like“go” or “give me…”), but can understand and react adequately to very complex newsentences like “Give the doggie some carrots”, or “Put the toy gorilla on the pot” and“can you throw the dog to Kelly?”(Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1993:116). Panbanisha,Kanzi’s stepsister, proved that Kanzi was not a single genius among the bonobos. Alex,the grey parrot, proved that you do not have to be a relative of humans to comprehend atleast a few human words and even to use them properly.Not unlike animals, humans can also learn to understand plenty of sounds madeby other species as well. This knowledge sometimes can be life saving. Everyone whohas read Jim Corbett’s brilliantly written accounts of hunting man-eating tigers andleopards in the Himalayan foothills in India, will remember that his life often dependedon his ability to hear and correctly understand other animal’s calls (like cheetal andkakar), indicating the presence and location of a man-eater. Our distant ancestors, livingcloser to the nature, were definitely much better at “reading” animal sounds than we aretoday. Animals can also distinguish calls of other species and use the informationcontained in these calls successfully in their everyday life without the ability to producethese calls themselves. Of course, animals that can copy other species calls can use thisability for their advantage, like the same Jim Corbett, who attracted his last man-eatingtigress by making a call of a tiger looking for a mate.Still, making vocal sounds for communication does not mean singing. “Althoughit is often stated that man is the only primate that can talk, it is rarely noted that he is alsothe only one that can sing” wrote Frank Livingstone rather controversially in his 1973article, arguing that the Australopithecines mostly communicated by means of singing.Singing as a means of communication in our non-talking ancestors has been investigatedby other scholars as well (see, for example, Otto Jespersen, 1895; Brown & Greenhood,1991; Richman, 1993, Mithen, 2005). In comparison with the ubiquitous vocalcommunication among animals, singing is a much more complex phenomenon. Anddespite this complexity, singing is still present in many unrelated species (like thehumpback whale in the ocean, the flying nightingale and the gibbon from the jungletreetops (see Marler, 1970, 2000; Nottebohm, 1971, 1972; Bright, 1984; Geissmann,2000; Payne, 2000). Maybe the species closest to us that can “sing” is the gibbon. Theconspicuous absence of singing among the great African apes suggests that humansdeveloped singing abilities later, after separating from our closest living relatives aboutsome 6 million years ago. Thus, the singing of the geladas (Richman, 1976, 1978, 1987),gibbons and siamangs (Gittens, 1978; Geissmann, 2000), as well as birds (Marler, 1970,2000; Nottebohm, 1971), humpback whales (Payne, 2000) and humans are analogues, nothomologues. It is difficult not to agree with S. Pinker that “in the tree of life, traits likeeyes or hands or infinite vocalizations can arise on any branch, or several times ondifferent branches, some leading to humans, some not” (Pinker, 1997:189). It is also