Researchers found that chimpanzees gesture back and forth quickly, like in human conversations. — AFP
IT WAS long thought that language was the prerogative of human beings, but research shows that animals are perfectly capable of communicating with each other.
Some species, such as chimpanzees, even have highly sophisticated communication systems that can have similarities with our own.
An international research team has studied the “conversations” of 252 wild chimpanzees living in five wild communities in East Africa.
They examined a total of 8,559 gestures made by these great apes in their natural environment. The researchers paid particular attention to the way chimpanzees communicate non-verbally.
As it turns out, chimpanzees have far greater flexibility in their gestures than in their vocalisations.
They have a highly elaborate gestural repertoire which they use to convey messages to one or more members of their group. Some of the gestures chimpanzees use are very explicit, while others are more obscure.
Unlike vocalisations, this communication system seems to share some properties in common with human language, such as intentionality, learning flexibility and rhythmicity.
Short pauses
The scientists noted that chimpanzees mark short pauses between a gesture and a gestural response of about 120 milliseconds.“We found that the timing of chimpanzee gesture and human conversational turn-taking is similar and very fast, which suggests that similar evolutionary mechanisms are driving these social, communicative interactions,” says the study’s first author, Gal Badihi, quoted in a news release.
The researchers also noticed that the different groups of chimpanzees did not pause for the same length of time between each gestural interaction.
They explain in their paper, published in the journal Current Biology, that chimpanzees from the Sonso community in Uganda took a few milliseconds longer than their fellow chimpanzees before responding to a communicative gesture.
“We did see a little variation among different chimp communities, which again matches what we see in people where there are slight cultural variations in conversation pace: some cultures have slower or faster talkers,” Badihi explains.
In other words, some chimpanzees “talk” faster than others – a surprising discovery which suggests that our mode of communication may not be as unique as we imagine. Nevertheless, the scientists have yet to understand why these great apes are communicating with each other by gesture. Is it necessarily to formulate a request to one of their peers? Or do they talk for pleasure? For the time being, the reasons remain unknown. – AFP Relaxnews
