Which finding, if true, would best support the researchers' claim?

Source Texts

Text

A 2025 study performed by Simon Townsend and colleagues presents evidence that bonobos, close relatives of chimpanzees, are capable of a rudimentary compositionality in communication—that is, they can organize sounds they make such that the order carries meaning in addition to the sounds themselves. After reviewing bonobo calls recorded in forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Townsend's team claimed that bonobos sometimes paired calls in specific orders and that the contexts of such pairs indicate they were deliberate communications rather than products of chance. The team based their claim on mathematical analysis of

A bonobo grunt seems to function as a request for other bonobos to join in whatever activity is ongoing, since bonobos emitting a grunt did so during potentially collaborative contexts such as feeding, nesting, and grooming.

Bonobos used a single yelp or a single peep as an imperative, but a yelp appeared to be closer to a command, while a peep tended to function as a suggestion.

While a single whistle from a bonobo was often an attempt to organize groups, a whistle preceded by a peep sound usually occurred in the presence of a charged social situation.

When bonobos paired grunts with other calls, they did not

When bonobos paired grunts with other calls, they did not appear to alter the meaning of the grunt, suggesting that call combinations in bonobos function as simple repetition rather than as compositional sequences.