Confirmed: orangutans can convey information about events no longer present. Mother orangutans postponed their alarm signals for as long as 20 minutes after a potential predator had vanished from view before alerting their young. In a Sumatran rainforest, scientists wearing cloths patterned with tiger stripes and similar designs approached seven wild orangutan mothers with infants. The females clearly detected the simulated threats. Several quietly relocated their offspring to safer positions. Rather than calling out at once and risking exposure, they frequently remained silent until the danger had departed. In 24 such presentations the mothers issued warning vocalizations on 12 occasions. Almost every call occurred only after the researchers in disguise had moved out of sight. The typical interval measured around seven minutes, with one individual delaying a full 20 minutes. This temporal gap matters because the signals referred to a hazard that was no longer in immediate view. Humans routinely perform the same action when recounting yesterday’s events or cautioning others about a risk observed earlier. Researchers term this capacity displaced reference, a core building block of human language. The investigation does not demonstrate that orangutans construct narratives about the past in the human sense. The sample comprised only seven mothers, and the vocalizations were not decoded into precise semantic content. Nevertheless, the duration of the pause varied according to the proximity of the apparent predator and the age of the infant. Such modulation indicates deliberate timing rather than an automatic fear response. The calls may have fulfilled dual roles: informing the young that residual danger might linger and instructing them about the appearance of possible threats. Upon publication in 2018 the authors presented the results as the earliest documented instance of this form of deferred signaling among free-ranging nonhuman primates. The behavior may illuminate cognitive foundations from which human language later emerged. [Lameira, A. R., & Call, J. (2018). Time-space–displaced responses in the orangutan vocal system. Science Advances, 4(11), eaau3401. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau3401]