Chimpanzees and humans are even more alike than we knew.
Researchers at the University of St Andrews in the UK have been studying gestures in chimps for some time.
All in all, the team analyzed more than 8,500 gestures from 252 chimpanzees.
Two chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) sitting next to each other.© DeAgostini/Getty Images
Gestures between two individual chimpanzees made about 14% of these communications.
This also matches slight variation between human societies with some groups being slow or fast talkers.
An ancestral feature?
Chimpanzee gestural communication and human language could have followed similar evolutionary paths to arrive at this fast-paced communicative strategy.
At the same time, chimpanzee communication almost certainly does differ in important ways from human language.
So its likely that this structure has a different function for them than it does for us.
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