Nibbling on a leaf, how a chimp signals that it’s in mood for love
RESEARCHERS have compiled the world’s first ‘chimpanzee dictionary’.
The team, from St Andrews University, Fife, translated gestures used by wild chimpanzees to communicate – revealing that man’s closest cousins have 1 specific messages with a ‘lexicon’ of 66 gestures.
A chimp very obviously taking small bites from leaves is signalling that they are ready and willing for sexual partners. And a mother chimp waving her foot is telling her children, ‘Jump up, I’ll carry you’.
Ape experts Dr Catherine Hobaiter and Professor Richard Byrne filmed chimps in the rainforests of Uganda and examined more than 5,000 exchanges.
Dr Hobaiter, who led the research, said only humans and chimps deliberately sent a message to another individual.
She said: ‘The big message is that there is another species out there that is meaningful in its communication. But then chimps are more closely related to us than they are to the rest of the great apes, so it makes sense that we are incredibly similar to them in many ways.’
Although previous research has revealed that apes and monkeys can understand complex information from another animal’s call, the animals do not appear to use their voices to communicate messages intentionally.
Dr Hobaiter added: ‘Now that the basic chimpanzee gesture dictionary is known, we can start to tackle other interesting questions.
‘Do some gestures have very general meanings, where their intended sense is understood from the context? Or do subtle variations in how a gesture is made determine which sense was meant?’
The research is published in the journal Current Biology.