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Linguists claim that humans learned to speak by copying primates and birds 100,000 years ago. A silvery gibbon is pictured

There are plenty of animals that talk by mimicking the language of humans.

But now linguists claim that humans learned to speak by copying primates and birds 100,000 years ago.

While previous research has suggested that humans copied the melodic part of our language from birds, U.S. experts now think that we evolved the content-carrying part of our speech from primates.

The two types of communication fused together into roughly the form of human language that we know today, the experts said.

Shigeru Miyagawa, a linguist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (MIT) said: 'How did human language arise? It's far enough in the past that we can't just go back and figure it out directly. The best we can do is come up with a theory that is broadly compatible with what we know about human language and other similar systems in nature.'

Scientists believe that human language is unique as it can expand to describe an infinite amount of new meanings. But our language still shares qualities with other animals.

'Yes, human language is unique, but if you take it apart in the right way, the two parts we identify are in fact of a finite state,' Dr Miyagawa said.

'Those two components have antecedents in the animal world. According to our hypothesis, they came together uniquely in human language.'

The team's reasoning goes that as birds only sing a certain number of melodies, humans much have incorporated another aspect from nature – probably from primates.

Dr Miyagawa explained that the human language consists of two distinct layers: the expressive layer, which relates to the structure of sentences, and the 'lexical layer' where the meaning is found.

While previous research has suggested that humans got the melodic part of our language from birds, U.S. experts now think that we evolved the content-carrying part of our speech from primates. A screen print showing a family of prehistoric cave dwellers is pictured

He thinks that both layers are derived from the languages of birds and mammals.

The researchers, who were joined by colleagues from the University of Tokyo, admit that there is more work to be done on their hypothesis.

The most recent ancestor between birds and humans appears to have existed about 300 million years ago, so there would almost have to be an indirect connection via older primates - even possibly the silvery gibbon, which is unusual because it sings.

The endangered animals can make long, complicated songs using 14 types of note to signal territory, woo mates and communicate with family members.

Robert Berwick, co-author of the study, published in the journal Psychology, noted that researchers are still exploring how these two modes could have merged in humans, but the general concept of new functions developing from existing building blocks is a familiar one in evolution.

'You have these two pieces. You put them together and something novel emerges,' he said.

'We can't go back with a time machine and see what happened, but we think that's the basic story we're seeing with language.'