Chimpanzees take turns interrupting when they “talk,” just like humans do.

Any moderately civilized person who enters into a conversation with someone else will wait for the other person to respond before giving an answer. Even scientists have calculated the time the time that elapses on average between these exchanges of information: some 200 milliseconds, constant speed across all cultureswhich suggests that it is a universal code that facilitates interpersonal communication.

Now a group of researchers has determined that this is not just a human quality, but something that We share it with one of our closest evolutionary relatives: chimpanzees..

This is the conclusion reached by a group of researchers after analyzing the behavior of chimpanzees from different communities in East Africa. By carefully observing 8,500 gestures from more than 250 individuals, they determined that that these primates communicate almost as quickly as humans. Not only that, they also found that They use gestures to reinforce conversation. and they even interrupt each other, just as we do in a heated argument.

Some very close relatives

Jane Goodall revolutionized the field of ethology with her research in Gombe, Tanzania, in the 1960s. Their observations showed that chimpanzees (Pantroglodytes), They were able to create tools, an ability that was previously thought to be exclusive to humans.

Not only that, but by carefully observing the behavior of these primates in the wild, he discovered that our closest evolutionary relatives also exhibited typical human behavior.: hugged, kissed, used decent political tricks Game of Thrones to achieve their goals, as well as They created powerful alliances which were useful both for war and peace. They have not been recorded in any species other than our own.

Now, an interdisciplinary team of psychologists, biologists and neuroscientists from the University of St Andrews in Scotland have gone one step further and have managed to demonstrate that chimpanzees also have an acquired communication system very similar to the one humans have evolved. Their research was recently published in the journal Current Biology.

A typical argument in a couple

The scientists wanted to go further and find out to what extent chimpanzees interact in the same way we do. To find out, reviewed hundreds of hours of images from a massive database of gestural interactions recorded over decades of fieldwork in East Africa. After carefully studying the images and analyzing the precise movements, they analyzed each gesture and each reaction. In doing so, they found that chimpanzees responded to gestures with another gesture in 14% of interactions.

In one case, two specimens exchanged seven gestures in a row. They were a young male, Daudi, from the Budongo forest in Uganda, hunting a small antelope, and a young female, Onyofi. Each time she made a pleading gesture, Daudi responded by waving his arms, lunging, and stamping his feet, as if telling her to “go away” or “go away.”

The most curious thing is that some of their gestures are extremely similar to ours. For example, scientists have found that when chimpanzees stretch out their hands in supplication, they most often ask for something that can mean “look after me”, “give me”, “come with me”. In most cases, the researchers checked that the interlocutor answered the question. In some cases, he even responded with a different gesture.: for example, by indicating the place where he wants to be courted, as if to say: “You court me first.”

They speak in turns, although sometimes they interrupt each other.

The scientists found that the chimps communicated quickly and in syncopated tones, although their conversations sometimes overlapped. They interrupted each other, just as we humans do when we are deep in heated conversation. Plus, youThey spent an average of 120 thousandths of a second responding to a gesture from one of their peers.just under 200 thousandths of a second that it takes us humans to do the same thing.

The chimpanzees always responded, often with a different gesture.

“It’s fascinating to see how close chimpanzees and humans were in their time, and that, like us, these primates also occasionally interrupted themselves mid-gesture,” explains Professor Kat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews and a co-author of the study.

Different times for different cultures

Another curiosity was to find out to what extent the chimpanzees interacted They preserved cultural traditionssimilar to those observed in different human languages. There were differences between populations. For example, members of five communities maintained rapid gestural interaction. But members of the Sonso community, living in the Budongo jungle in Uganda, They responded a little slower than their peers. Differences that correspond to different communication patterns of people depending on their cultural characteristics.

And although the structure of conversation is a universal pattern, it also presents certain cultural variations. This explains, for example, why conversations in different languages ​​show the same time intervals between conversational turns, although there are also significant differences depending on the language.

For example, research from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics shows that The average time for Japanese speakers was seven milliseconds, while it took the Danes 470 milliseconds to intervene.

“We still don’t know when and why these rules of communication between humans evolved,” said Dr. Gal Badihi, lead author of the study. “Studying more distantly related species will be a great way to better understand when and why these rules of communication evolved.”