Chimpanzees communicate with each other at a speed comparable to human conversation

When chimpanzees socialize, they exchange gestures at a rate similar to how humans converse.

The researchers surveyed five wild chimpanzees.Pan troglodytesThe researchers studied 8,559 gestures made by 252 chimpanzees across chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) communities in East Africa — one of the largest studies of its kind. They recorded face-to-face interactions between the apes, recording the timing of one chimpanzee's gestures relative to those of the other.

An analysis of the ape “conversations” found that chimpanzees' signaling intervals are remarkably similar to human interactions, and even a little faster: “On average, it takes 120 milliseconds between the end of one gesture and the start of the next,” the researchers say. Gal Badig “In humans, the average is about 200 milliseconds, so this is very close,” said researchers at the University of St Andrews in the UK.

All chimpanzee groups responded quickly, but the exact timing varied from group to group: for example, chimpanzees from Sonso, Uganda, took a few milliseconds longer to return the gesture than the other chimpanzee groups studied.

Such differences in timing exist in human languages ​​too. For example, Japanese speakers generally Faster turn changes Japanese people have a different conversational style than Danish speakers. “We don't know exactly why,” says Vadig. “As with humans, we don't know if it's a cultural difference, something we've learned over time, or a reaction to our environment.”

Only 14 percent of the interactions the researchers observed between chimpanzees involved any kind of interaction. Most consisted of a single gesture, such as “go away” or “follow me,” in which the other person ran away or followed. But interactions were more frequent when the chimpanzees were negotiating over food or grooming.

“What's really exciting about this study is that it shows that communication is a cooperative, socially engaged process in non-human animals,” Budig says, “and that the processes involved in human language may have actually evolved much earlier than we thought.”