The most striking number in this year’s race for the Dolittle Prize is not the $100,000 on the table or the $10 million grand prize waiting behind it. It is twelve. That is the size of the entire vocal repertoire wild chimpanzees in Ivory Coast appear to draw on, according to one of the four finalist teams. With only a dozen basic calls, the chimps generate a far larger range of messages by combining those sounds in different orders, a flexibility that looks close to something we once reserved for ourselves.
The prize, sponsored by the British financier Jeremy Coller and administered by Tel Aviv University, awards $100,000 each year to the research team making the most significant advance toward deciphering animal communication. Behind it sits a larger lure: a $10 million equity investment or $500,000 in cash for any team that can demonstrate sustained two-way communication, defined as an animal initiating contact on its own without recognizing that a human is on the other end.
Every finalist this year leaned on the same family of tools that powers large language models. Nicolas Mathevon’s work on the African striped mouse recorded 122,619 squeaks from wild mice over twelve days using 23 microphones. When the team fed those recordings to a neural network, it found that each nest carried its own vocal signature, and later identified signatures unique to individual mice. Mathevon is direct about why the machine matters: with that many vocalizations, a human researcher simply cannot manage the data.
The chimpanzee work pushes into more contested territory. Catherine Crockford and Roman Wittig built an archive of roughly 20,000 hours of recordings from chimpanzees in Taï National Park, following a population of about 150 animals across three generations. Their recent analysis found that a single call carries one meaning, and the same call embedded in a pair can shift toward another. A “hoo” alone tends to signal resting. Combined with a “pant,” the combination is associated with building a nest. Earlier studies had found animals reshuffling calls mainly to raise alarms. This finding suggests the reshuffling reaches into ordinary daily life.
The bonobo work, led by Mélissa Berthet, found that a “peep” combined with a “whistle” produces a meaning tied to tense social moments, something close to a request to make peace. Julie Elie’s zebra finch work catalogued eleven call types and then checked whether the birds agreed with the human sorting by training finches to peck buttons. The birds grouped the sounds by meaning rather than by raw acoustics. The scientists closest to the work are also the ones raising the loudest warnings. Jonathan Birch, a philosopher at the LSE on the prize’s judging panel, sets the honest distance plainly: fluent two-way contact remains far off. The decoding has run well ahead of the dialogue, which is how this kind of capability tends to arrive.
