The rapid back-and-forth of face-to-face conversations isn’t unique to humans. While chimpanzees typically favor gestures over sounds, their exchange of ideas is just as rapid as ours and reflects similar cultural patterns, a new study finds.
By observing the synchronization of gestures within wild chimpanzee communities in East Africa, an international team of researchers found that responses followed pauses of up to a second. Some reactions were virtually instantaneous, with chimps interrupting each other, much as we do during a heated discussion.
“We found that the timing of chimpanzee gestures and human conversations is similar and very fast, suggesting that similar evolutionary mechanisms are driving these social and communicative interactions,” said lead author Gal Badihi, an ethologist at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom.
This means that the way we communicate may have originated somewhere early in our evolutionary history, before humans and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, split millions of years ago.
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By examining more than 8,500 examples of gestures from 252 chimpanzees, Badihi and his colleagues not only observed patterns similar to human communication in the chimpanzees’ activities, but they also found differences in communication between their cultures.
“We saw a slight variation across different chimpanzee communities, which again is consistent with what we see in people where there are slight cultural variations in speaking rate: some cultures have slower or faster speakers,” Badihi says.
The Kanyawara chimpanzees in Uganda appear to be fast “talkers” compared to the Sonso chimpanzees that live in the nearby Budongo Forest, the researchers observed.
“In humans, it’s the Danes who are slowest to react, and in eastern chimpanzees it’s the Sonso community in Uganda,” says Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St Andrews.
Previous research has identified other similarities in the ways we communicate. Just as our words form sentences to convey meaning, for example, chimpanzees also combine short, frequently used gestures to form longer sequences of meaning.
The researchers are curious to learn more about what these chimps are saying to each other and suspect that many of these gestures may be requests. The researchers have already identified 58 different versions of the “let’s play” gesture that chimps use in the wild.
“Communication helps chimpanzees avoid conflict and coordinate with each other. Their gestures allow them to communicate over short distances to achieve social goals in the moment,” Badihi told the PA news agency.
“So one chimpanzee might signal to another that it wants food, and the other might give it food or, if it feels less generous, respond by signaling it to move away.”
In one observation, a chimpanzee named Monica reached out after a physical conflict with another chimpanzee named Ursus. Ursus patted her back, reassuring her, showing how these gestures can be used to restore harmony.
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Although there are still many obvious differences between chimpanzee and human language, similar rules appear to underlie both systems.
“We still don’t know when these conversational structures evolved, or why,” Hobaiter says. “To answer that question, we need to study communication in more distant species, to determine whether these structures are unique to great apes or whether they are common to other highly social species, such as elephants or ravens.”
This research was published in Current Biology.
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