Move aside, Vito Corleone and Sophia Loren! It’s not just Italians who gesture with their hands – chimpanzees do too, study finds

From Vito Corleone in The Godfather to Sophia Loren in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Italian characters are known for using exaggerated hand gestures.

Now it turns out that our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, do this too.

Researchers have found that primates gesture rapidly back and forth, much like in human conversation.

A team from the University of St Andrews in Scotland collected data on more than 8,500 gestures from 252 chimpanzees living in five wild communities in East Africa.

They measured the timing of turn-taking and conversation patterns between individuals communicating with each other using gestures rather than speech.

Analysis showed that most “conversations” consisted of two parts between two people, but some consisted of as many as seven parts.

Examples of this are chimpanzees that exchange gestures after a conflict, where one chimpanzee reaches out to the other and then taps the other’s hand.

In another recorded interaction, chimpanzees exchanged reassuring gestures while walking around in a large group.

Individuals greeted each other with grunts, while some individuals hugged and ‘kissed’ each other with open mouths.

“Although human languages ​​are incredibly diverse, we all have one thing in common: our conversations are lightning fast, lasting on average just 200 milliseconds,” said Professor Catherine Hobaiter, one of the study’s authors.

Examples of this are chimpanzees that exchange gestures after a conflict, where one reaches out to the other and the hand is tapped in response.

In another recorded interaction, chimpanzees exchanged reassuring gestures while traveling in a large group

‘But it was questionable whether this was specifically human, or whether other animals also share this structure.’

Overall, their chimpanzee data showed similar timing to human conversations, with short pauses between a gesture and a response of about 120 milliseconds.

“We found that the timing of chimpanzee gestures and human conversations is similar and very fast, suggesting that similar evolutionary mechanisms drive these social, communicative interactions,” said lead researcher Dr. Gal Badihi.

‘We saw a little bit of variation between different chimpanzee communities, which is consistent with what we see in humans, where there are slight cultural differences in the pace of conversation – some cultures have slower or faster talkers.’

From Vito Corleone in The Godfather (pictured) to Sophia Loren in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Italian characters are known for using exaggerated hand gestures

The team said that among humans, the Danes are the “slower” speakers. Among eastern chimpanzees, the equivalent is the Sonso community in Uganda.

According to them, published in the journal Current Biology, their findings suggest that human communication may not be as unique as previously thought.

“It shows that other social species do not need language to engage in short-range, rapid-response communicative exchanges,” Dr. Badihi said.

‘Human conversations may have a similar evolutionary history or trajectory to the communication systems of other species, suggesting that this type of communication is not unique to humans but is more widespread among social animals.’

In future studies, the team wants to investigate why chimpanzees have these conversations at all. They believe that chimpanzees often use gestures to ask each other for something.