Chimpanzees gesture back and forth quickly like in human conversations, researchers find

JULY 22, 2024
by Cell Press



Group of chimpanzees including mothers, juveniles, subadults, and infants grooming and playing. Credit: Catherine Hobaiter


When people are having a conversation, they rapidly take turns speaking and sometimes even interrupt. Now, researchers who have collected the largest ever dataset of chimpanzee "conversations" have found that they communicate back and forth using gestures following the same rapid-fire pattern. The findings are reported on July 22 in the journal Current Biology.

"While human languages are incredibly diverse, a hallmark we all share is that our conversations are structured with fast-paced turns of just 200 milliseconds on average," said Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St Andrews, UK. "But it was an open question whether this was uniquely human, or if other animals share this structure."

"We found that the timing of chimpanzee gesture and human conversational turn-taking is similar and very fast, which suggests that similar evolutionary mechanisms are driving these social, communicative interactions," says Gal Badihi, the study's first author.

The researchers knew that human conversations follow a similar pattern across people living in places and cultures all over the world. They wanted to know if the same communicative structure also exists in chimpanzees even though they communicate through gestures rather than through speech. To find out, they collected data on chimpanzee "conversations" across five wild communities in East Africa.

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