From short ‘tsiks’ and ‘ekks’ to drawn-out ‘phees’ – all the sounds produced by marmoset monkeys are made up of individual syllables of fixed length: that is the result of a study by a team of researchers headed by Dr. Steffen Hage of the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuro-science (CIN) at the University of Tübingen. The smallest units of vocalisation and their rhythmic production in the brain of our relatives could also have been a prerequisite of human speech. The study was just published in Current Biology.