The world's spoken languages are universally composed of vowels and consonants, but the primate prototypical call repertoire is almost exclusively composed of vowel-like calls. What was the origin of consonant-like calls? Their prevalence across great apes suggests that an arboreal lifestyle and extractive foraging were ecological preconditions for speech evolution.
Keywords: consonants; extractive foraging; feeding ecology; great apes; speech evolution; speech origin.
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