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For a long time, it was thought that language was the preserve of human beings. But research in ethology shows that animals are quite capable of communicating with each other. Some species, such as chimpanzees, even have a very sophisticated communication system, which is not unlike our own.
An international research team studied the conversations of 252 wild chimpanzees living in five communities in East Africa. They examined a total of 8,559 gestures made by the great apes in their natural environment. The researchers paid particular attention to how the chimpanzees communicate nonverbally.
Because it turns out that monkeys have much greater flexibility in their gestures than in their vocalizations. They have a very elaborate gestural repertoire that they use to transmit a message to one or more members of their group. Some gestures that chimpanzees use are very explicit, while others are more obscure. Unlike vocalizations, this communication system seems to share some common properties with human language such as intentionality, flexibility of learning but also rhythm.
In fact, scientists have noticed that chimpanzees pause for 120 milliseconds when communicating with one of their own.We found that the timing of chimpanzee gestures and human conversational exchanges is similar and very rapid, suggesting that similar evolutionary mechanisms underlie these social and communicative interactions.“, says Gal Badihi, lead author of the study, in a statement.
Furthermore, the researchers noticed that different groups of chimpanzees did not pause for the same length of time between each gestural interaction. They explain in their studypublished in the journal Current Biology, that chimpanzees in the Sonso community in Uganda took a few milliseconds longer than their peers before responding to a communicative gesture.We found a slight variation between different chimpanzee communities, which is consistent with what we see in humans, where there are slight cultural variations in the pace of conversation; some cultures have slower or faster speakers.“, explains Gal Badihi in the same press release.
In other words, some chimpanzees “talk” faster than others. A surprising discovery that suggests that our mode of communication may not be as unique as we imagine. Nevertheless, ethologists have yet to understand why these great apes communicate with each other through gestures. Is it necessarily to formulate a request to one of their peers? Or do they sometimes talk for pleasure? For now, the mystery remains.