“Chimpanzee gestural exchanges share temporal structure with human language”. This is the title of a study authored by an international team of primatologists recently published in the journal Current Biology.

The ability to listen to a speaker and respond quickly (in English, this skill is termed ‘turn-taking’) was previously associated exclusively with human languages.

The study in question, which is the result of analyzing conversations of various groups of chimpanzees in the wild in Africa for over 15 years, confirms that our evolutionary relatives also engage in rapid turn-taking in their conversations, mainly involving gestures.

Chimpanzees take about 200 milliseconds between gestures (with small differences among different groups) before responding back and forth, very similar to the timing practiced by humans.

According to the study’s abstract, “this correspondence between human and chimpanzee face-to-face communication points to shared underlying rules in communication. These structures could be derived from shared ancestral mechanisms or convergent strategies that enhance coordinated interactions or manage competition for communicative ‘space’.”

Read the complete study at https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)00761-9#