-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email When people talk to each other, their conversations usually include many fast twists. Humans do not naturally talk in Shakespearean soliloquies, but by regularly interrupting and wildly gesticulating. The conventional wisdom is that our chats will take major turns roughly every 200 milliseconds — and new research in the journal Current Biology reveals that chimpanzees do the same thing.
"They would go back and forth with ‘groom me,’ ‘no you groom me,’ ‘no me’ for ages before one would finally give in and make the first move." "Chimpanzees also engage in rapid signal-to-signal turn-taking during face-to-face gestural exchanges" to roughly the same extent as humans, the authors write. "This correspondence between human and chimpanzee face-to-face communication points to shared underlying rules in communication.
" The authors speculate that this could be due to chimpanzees and humans sharing the same ancestors or because they coincidentally developed similar strategies for coordinating interactions and managing competition to communicate. Related Scientists figured out chimpanzees have a rudimentary language by pranking them with fake snakes The scientists learned this by gathering data on chimpanzee “conversations” across five wild communities in East Africa, ultimately including more than 8,500 gestures for 252 individuals. The scientists specifically focused on the turn-taking and conversational patterns of their chimpa.
