Humans aren’t the only species that exchange rapid, face-to-face messages: Although chimpanzees generally prefer gestures over speech, they exchange ideas just as quickly as humans and reflect similar cultural patterns, a new study finds.
An international team of researchers looked at the timing of gestures among groups of wild East African chimpanzees and found that responses were followed by pauses of up to one second, some of which were almost instantaneous, with chimpanzees interrupting each other as in a heated argument.
“We found that the timing of turn-taking in chimpanzee gestures and human conversation is similar and very rapid, suggesting that similar evolutionary mechanisms drive these social and communicative interactions.” explain Lead author Gal Badik is an animal behaviourist at the University of St Andrews in the UK.
This means that our way of communicating likely originated somewhere in evolutionary history, before our closest living relatives, humans and chimpanzees, split off. Millions of years ago.
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After examining more than 8,500 gestures from 252 chimpanzees, Budig and his colleagues found that chimpanzee behavior reveals patterns that are similar to human communication but also reflect communication differences between chimpanzees and chimpanzee cultures.
“We found some variation between chimpanzee communities, which is consistent with humans, who have some cultural differences in the pace of speech. Some people in some cultures speak slower and some faster.” To tell Badihi.
The researchers observed that Uganda’s Kanyawara chimpanzees appear to be “fast talkers” compared to their Sonso counterparts, who live in nearby Budongo Forest.
“In humans, the Danes are slower to react. In eastern chimpanzees, the Sonso people of Uganda are slower.” To tell Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St Andrews.
Previous research The team also identified other similarities in how humans communicate: for example, just as human language structures sentences to give meaning, chimpanzees combine frequently used, short gestures to form longer strings of meaning.
The researchers want to know more about what these chimps are saying to each other, and they suspect that many of their gestures may be requests. They have already identified 58 different versions of the “let’s play” gesture used by wild chimps.
“Communication helps chimpanzees avoid conflict and coordinate with each other. Their gestures allow them to communicate over short distances to achieve their social goals in the moment,” Budig says. Said PA News Agency.
“So when one chimpanzee gestures to another that it wants food, the other chimpanzee may respond by either giving it the food or by gesticulating to go away if it feels the other is being less than generous.”
in One Observation A chimpanzee named Monica held out his hand after a physical conflict with a fellow chimp named Ursus, who patted him back in reassurance, illustrating how gestures can be used to restore harmony.
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Thus, although there are still many clear differences between chimpanzee and human language, similar rules appear to underpin both systems.
“We still don’t know when these conversational structures evolved or why they evolved.” To tell “To answer that question, we need to study communication in more distantly related species,” Hobaiter said. “That will help us understand whether it’s a uniquely ape trait, or whether it’s something we share with other highly social species, like elephants and ravens.”
This study Current Biology.
