<\/p>\n
An animal keeper interacts with a female chimpanzee Dec. 7, 2007, in the Royev Ruchey zoo in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ilya Naymushin, REUTERS<\/p>\n
“Human laughter is faster, more variable and more sensitive to social context than the laughter of other great apes. Chimpanzees and bonobos are indeed our closest relatives, and their laughter is generally more similar to ours than that of gorillas or orangutans. However, human laughter still stands out in its degree of rhythmic complexity and flexibility,” De Gregorio said.<\/p>\n
The human evolutionary lineage diverged from the lineage that led to chimpanzees and bonobos perhaps 7 million years ago.<\/p>\n
The researchers analyzed recordings of laughter from four chimpanzees, three bonobos, two gorillas, four orangutans and four people, measuring the timing between each burst of sound in a total of 140 sequences of laughter. The ape recordings were made in their home environments in zoos in Germany and Malaysia while individual apes were engaged in play or were gently tickled by human caretakers familiar to them.<\/p>\n
People were found to change the speed of their laughter depending on the situation.<\/p>\n
“Our study shows that laughter has changed gradually over the course of great ape and human evolution,” De Gregorio said.<\/p>\n
“One striking difference is that humans appear able to modify the temporal structure of laughter according to context. In our study, we found little evidence that great apes alter the rhythmic structure of their laughter across different situations in the same way humans do, although future research may reveal subtler forms of variation,” De Gregorio said.<\/p>\n
The researchers said their findings could have implications for understanding the origins of human speech.<\/p>\n
“By studying laughter in our closest relatives, we can better understand not only where language came from, but also the social and emotional foundations that make us human,” De Gregorio said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An animal keeper interacts with a female chimpanzee Dec. 7, 2007, in the Royev Ruchey zoo in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[39991,18,19,17,242544,133],"class_list":["post-568868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-dcc","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lee-national","tag-science"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116862946350757621","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}