Dancing chimps show same primeval urge as man
The king of the swingers really can be found in the jungle.
It’s just that, unlike in Jungle Book, it is not the orangutans dancing along to the music, but the chimpanzees.
Scientists have shown that just like us, chimps cannot help moving when they hear a beat. They argue that the finding tells us something about the ancient evolutionary origins of music.
The study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was prompted by observations of how chimpanzees react to rain. Primatologists have said previously how the animals perform ‘‘rain dances’’ and ‘‘waterfall dances’’ during heavy storms.
‘‘At the start of heavy rain, adult male chimpanzees show rhythmic swaying,’’ scientists from the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University wrote.
‘‘These displays are considered some kind of collective response to the sound and fury of nature and have been linked to human rituals in response to natural forces that are sensorially overwhelming.’’ There was something about the rain dance that seemed linked to humans’ urge to dance, the researchers felt. To test the idea, they played seven chimpanzees a selection of toetapping piano music and waited to see whether, as in humans, it induced movement.
‘‘Music and dance are universal across human culture and have an ancient history,’’ they wrote.
‘‘One characteristic of music is its strong influence on movement. For example, an auditory beat induces rhythmic movement with emotions in humans.’’
The same seemed to be true in the chimpanzees. One, called Akira, did particularly well. The scientists reported that, much like a clubber after one too many, ‘‘he swayed horizontally in a quadrupedal posture and vertically in a bipedal posture’’.
However, much like the clubber, neither he nor his fellows were particularly good at keeping time to the beat. This was itself interesting, the researchers said. ‘‘It was possible that Akira responded to sound event density positive rather than rhythm per se,’’ they said. ‘‘This may indicate a critical difference from humans.’’ Even human infants change the regularity of their movement in response to a beat.
The fact that there was an apparent innate response to rhythm at all, however, implied that humans and chimpanzees – our closest relatives – shared neurological mechanisms for processing music.
Scientists still struggle to explain why we like music at all. ‘‘Music and dance are universal across human culture and have an ancient history,’’ the scientists, Yuko Hattori and Masaki Tomonaga, wrote. ‘‘Several hypotheses have been suggested to explain the evolutionary origins of music and dance, such as courtship displays, group cohesion, and coalition signalling. However, much remains unknown.’’
Although many creatures, birds in particular, perform ritualised mating dances, spontaneous movement in response to music is extremely rare. Earlier this year a study reported on a cockatoo called Snowball who had developed a series of dance moves that he performed to different songs. Snowball easily adapted to different artists ranging from the Backstreet Boys to Madonna but his skills seemed rare among fellow birds.
In contrast, the chimpanzee behaviour is common.
If whatever causes humans to dance is the same as what causes chimpanzees to dance, it suggests the origin comes from our shared common ancestor – a primate that lived some six million years ago in Africa: the first king of the swingers. – The Times