An international team of scientists from Scotland, Germany and the US has discovered significant similarities between human and chimpanzee gestures. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Current Biology (CurBio).
Chimpanzees have a rich repertoire of paw movements, many of which are simple requests such as “stop,” “follow me,” or “clean me.”
To learn more about the rules surrounding their use, the researchers examined more than 8,500 movements recorded from 252 animals.
Most interactions were brief, but in some cases the chimps exchanged up to seven gestures in rapid succession. In these exchanges, the apes typically took 120 milliseconds to respond to each other, compared with the average human’s 200-millisecond response time during conversation.
Both humans and chimpanzees are great apes, so rapid nonverbal communication may be the product of a common evolutionary legacy, the researchers noted.
Alternatively, rapid turn-taking may be a feature of wider social communication and may be present in other species such as whales, dolphins, bats and hyenas.
Earlier scientists I learnedthat expressive facial expressions help monkeys occupy a leading position in society.