Apes exchange greetings like humans

London, May 25: The communicative exchanges in bonobos and chimpanzees closely resemble human communication — which is one of the most sophisticated siglling systems in the animal kingdom — being highly cooperative and including fast interactions. The team of Marlen Frohlich and Simone Pika from Germany’s Max Planck Institute conducted the first systematic comparison of communicative interactions in mother-infant group of two different bonobo and two different chimpanzee communities in their tural environments. The study showed that communicative exchanges in both species resemble cooperative turn-taking sequences in human conversation. However, bonobos and chimpanzees differ in their communication styles. “For bonobos, gaze plays a more important role and they seem to anticipate sigls before they have been fully articulated,” said Marlen Froehlich in the study published in the jourl Scientific Reports. In contrast, chimpanzees engage in more time-consuming communicative negotiations and use clearly recognizable units such as sigl, pause and response. (IANS)