For more than 15 years, an international team of researchers intermittently followed five groups of eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in the jungles of Uganda and Tanzania. With cameras in hand, they diligently recorded hundreds of videos of chimpanzee chatter. “This took a lot of hard drives,” says primatologist Gal Badihi from the University of St. Andrews in the U.K., talking about the largest ever database of chimpanzee conversations. With this treasure trove of data, Badihi and her colleagues wondered how similarly humans and one of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, talk to each other. Sifting through more than 8,500 gestures between the 252 eastern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of the five groups captured in the videos, the researchers found something striking: just like humans, chimpanzees are chatty and “talk” back and forth in rapid turns, albeit less with words and more with gestures. The time between chimp gestures in a conversation, about 200 milliseconds, coincides with the time humans take to respond in a conversation. Their findings were published in the journal Current Biology. “The study came about out of us trying to look at how social relationships affect chimpanzee gestural communication,” Badihi says, adding this was the first time scientists studied turn-taking — where one party talks and the other listens before responding — in chimpanzees in detail. The researchers found turn-taking in communication was a chimpanzee-wide phenomenon, suggesting it’s an inherited and ingrained trait. “This is either something that chimpanzees and humans evolved around the same time, or…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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