Human conversations follow an almost universal beat: rapid-fire speech, turn-taking, the occasional interruption. Chimpanzees communicate that way, too, a new study suggests — shedding new light on behavior patterns that humans and primates appear to share.
The analysis, published in Current Biology, focused on video footage of five wild communities of East African chimpanzees in Uganda and Tanzania.
Researchers used video of chimps interacting with one another, isolating instances of communication between chimps and collecting data on which one initiated the exchange and how the primates responded to one another with gestures and other behaviors. Overall, the researchers looked at more than 8,500 gestures from 252 chimpanzees.
In analyzing “conversational” patterns, the researchers found that 14 percent of all interactions involved an exchange of gestures between interacting chimps. The vast majority of gestural interactions (83 percent) involved a two-part exchange of gesture for gesture. The chimps’ response timing was similar to that of humans, but it took longer for the animals to respond to gestures with other behaviors.
“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,” Gal Badihi, the paper’s first author and a research fellow at the University of St. Andrews, says in a news release.
Though timing did vary slightly by community, the researchers write that the similarities with human conversation suggest “shared mechanisms” between human and chimpanzees. Conversational turn-taking could have evolved to strengthen social bonds and align both members of the exchange, they write.
They call for future research on conversational patterns of other animals in a bid to understand why and how such norms evolved.
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