Watch the first orangutan taught to mimic human conversation - CNET

This is actually a big deal, because it means apes could have the ability to control their voices rather than just issue grunts that have been presumed to be relatively meaningless sounds brought on by instinct or response to some sort of stimuli.

"This indicates that the voice control shown by humans could derive from an evolutionary ancestor with similar voice control capacities as those found in orangutans and in all great apes more generally," anthropologist Adriano Lameria from the UK's University of Durham and the lead researcher studying Rocky, explained to New Scientist.

Hidden in Rocky's friendly grunts could be the missing link in the story of the development of human language. Maybe, just maybe, it explains how we evolved from speechless hominids to eloquent masters of language and recently backslid developed into the first species to communicate via an even more efficient means: our ever-expanding library of emojis.