2024-08-02 12:02:33
Animals communicate mostly through gestures, including hand movements and facial expressions.
Scientists who studied chimpanzee conversations in detail found that when exchanging information, they spoke right after each other, and sometimes interrupted each other.
The discovery reveals “a great deal of evolutionary similarity [su žmonėmis]related to the structure of face-to-face conversations,” says Professor Cat Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
C. Hobaiter, who studies primate communication, explained that such a quick transition to another speaker is a distinguishing feature of human conversations. “We all take about 200 milliseconds between turns to speak, although we have interesting little cultural differences,” she said.
In one of the 2009 a linguistic study found that Japanese people respond in an average of seven milliseconds during a conversation, while Danes interrupt in about 470 milliseconds.
After studying thousands of interactions between wild chimpanzees, Hobaiter and her colleagues were able to determine the timing of the animal’s exchange of words.
“It’s amazing to see how close the timing of the transition between chimpanzees and humans was,” she said.
To investigate the evolutionary origins of communication, scientists spent decades observing and recording the behavior of five wild chimpanzee communities in the forests of Uganda and Tanzania.
They recorded and translated more than 8,000 gestures used by more than 250 animals.
The main author of the study, Dr. Gal Badihi, who also works at the University of St. Andrews, explained that gestures allow chimpanzees to avoid conflict and coordinate their actions.
“One chimpanzee can gesture to the other that it wants food, and the other can give the food or, if they’re feeling less generous, respond by gesturing to go away. They can agree on how or where to comb their hair. It’s adorable, and it’s done in just a few short exchanges of gestures,” she explained.
Badihi said future research examining the communication of other, more distantly related primate species will provide a more complete evolutionary picture of why our communication style is the way it is.
“This will be a great way to better understand when and why our conversation rules evolved,” she added.
The results of the study have been published žurnale „Current Biology“.
BBC parents.
2024-08-02 12:02:33