New research revealed that wild chimpanzees communicate with each other using the most human-like gestures.
According to BBC, research published in the journal Current Biology suggested that animals communicate mostly with gestures, including facial expressions and hand movements.
For this study, researchers spent decades observing and analyzing the behavior of five communities of wild chimpanzees in the Uganda and Tanzania forests.
After observing for so long, researchers translated over 8,000 gestures of over 250 animals.
Lead researcher Dr. Gal Badihi explained, “So one chimpanzee could gesture to another that they want food, and the other might give them food or, if they feel less generous, respond by gesturing for them to go away. They might come to an agreement about how or where to groom. It’s fascinating and done in just a few short gesture exchanges.”
Prof. Cat Hobaiter, who studies primate communication, told BBC that similar to human beings, chimpanzees take gaps in their conversations.
She noted, “The gaps ranged from interrupting the signaller 1,600 milliseconds before they finished their gesture to taking 8,600 milliseconds to respond.”
Hobaiter explained, “This could be because the chimps were in a natural setting, so they could express a wider range of behavior, sometimes interrupting each other and other times taking a long time to respond."
