Scientists have already made it pretty clear that chimpanzees and humans share 98.8% of the same DNA, and a new study has revealed that they could also learn to share conversations.
According to a The New York Post report, citing a recent study published in the journal Current biologyChimpanzees send “rapid-fire” gestures to each other, in the same cadence as people.
“We found that the timing of chimpanzee gestures and human conversational turn-taking is similar and very rapid, suggesting that similar evolutionary mechanisms drive these social and communicative interactions,” said study first author Gal Badihi.
Researchers analyzed more than 8,500 gestures made by ape species in East Africa and found that 14 percent of their communications involved gestures between two chimpanzees.
Most exchanges were in two parts, but some extended to as many as seven different types of gestures.
The researchers also observed a time similar to that of human conversational reactions, approximately 120 milliseconds between interactions.
“We observed a small variation across chimpanzee communities, which is consistent with what we see in people, where there are slight cultural variations in the pace of conversation,” Badihi added.
The shared traits could be traced back to shared ancestral mechanisms, the report said.
“Human conversations may share a similar evolutionary history or trajectories to communication systems in other species, suggesting that this type of communication is not unique to humans but more widespread in social animals,” Badihi said.
However, there are many more questions that need to be answered, such as “when did these conversational structures evolve or why?”
“To get to that question, we need to explore communication in more distantly related species, so we can determine whether it's an ape trait or something we share with other highly social species, like elephants or crows.”
