recorded the results.<\/a> The new research reexamined those decades-old recordings and compared them with the newly captured giggles of four young children while they were being tickled and playing at home.<\/p>\nIt turns out that the chuckles of humans and great apes follow similar rhythms, with regular timing between their laughs, a uniting thread that probably reflects their ties to a common ancestor, researchers said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn a way, we are very similar to other great apes because we\u2019ve been laughing in a similar way for 15 million years,\u201d said study author Chiara De Gregorio, a primatologist at the University of Warwick in England.<\/p>\n
Laughter communicates a playful, happy feeling without using words. Many animals can laugh too, but the giggles don\u2019t follow human patterns as closely. When researchers tickle rats, for example, they respond with ultrasonic squeaks.<\/p>\n
Scientists trying to uncover how laughter evolved have picked apart animals\u2019 facial expressions, but less work has been done on how laughs sound. And compared with apes, human laughter has become faster and more complex. For one, our laughs sound different based on context \u2014 from a polite chuckle among colleagues to a full-bodied guffaw with close friends.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are like the masters of laughter, I would say,\u201d said De Gregorio, whose findings were published Thursday in the journal Communications Biology.<\/p>\n
These giggles evolved to best suit animals\u2019 different social lives, said Brittany Florkiewicz, who studies animal communication at Lyon College and had no role in the new research. She said the study\u2019s findings make sense, and point to a need for more investigation.<\/p>\n
Florkiewicz said she\u2019d like to hear comparable recordings of other animals with playful facial expressions, such as dogs, horses and cats. That could tell us more about how laughter evolved, so we can \u201cunderstand what makes us uniquely human, but also what is similar between humans and other animals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Studying the origins of laughter may seem corny, but it\u2019s one aspect of human communication that can help us understand others \u2014 including how we learned to speak. Because sounds don\u2019t fossilize, scientists are using the evidence we do have to trace things back, one chuckle at a time.<\/p>\n
Ramakrishnan writes for the Associated Press. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Humans and great apes have been giggling in similar ways since branching off the evolutionary tree, a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":896776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[27],"tags":[4749,363370,363369,363368,300901,363365,56435,291480,6359,330464,337976,363367,26298,159,363366,67,132,68,211272,837],"class_list":["post-896775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-animal","tag-brittany-florkiewicz","tag-chuckle","tag-facial-expression","tag-finding","tag-giggle","tag-gorilla","tag-great-ape","tag-human","tag-laugh","tag-laughter","tag-other-ape","tag-researcher","tag-science","tag-similar-way","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-warwick","tag-wildlife"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/896776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}