What Chimpanzee Gestures Reveal About Human Communication

This episode explores the significance of chimpanzee gestures and what they reveal about the origins of human communication.

1. Chimpanzee gestures are intricate and serve as a crucial mode of communication, especially in the absence of spoken language.
2. The study of these gestures suggests that some foundations of human conversation, like turn-taking, might have evolved before humans diverged from other great apes.
3. Chimpanzees can engage in multi-part exchanges that resemble human conversations, indicating a higher level of social interaction than previously understood.
4. The rapid timing of these gestures closely parallels the conversational paces found in human interactions.
5. Insights from this research contribute significantly to our understanding of the evolution of communication in primates.

1: Introduction

Hosts introduce the episode's topics and guests, setting the stage for a discussion on science news.
Regina Barber: "All of that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR."

2: Chimpanzee Gestures

Discussion on a recent study about chimpanzee communication through gestures.
Emily Kwong: "Chimps definitely do...gestures are really important for communication."

3: Human Communication Parallels

Exploring how chimpanzee communication might mirror early human conversational structures.
Gal Badihi: "They seem to have this back and forth in a face to face communicative setup that kind of resembles human conversations a little bit more."

4: Additional Scientific Topics

The episode shifts focus to other scientific discoveries, including oxygen production at the ocean floor and AI predictions of rogue waves.
Elsa Chang: "That is so fascinating. Okay, now we're gonna take a sharp turn and move to oxygen on the seafloor."

1. Observe non-verbal cues in daily interactions to enhance communication understanding.
2. Consider the role of body language in conveying emotions and intentions.
3. Reflect on the evolutionary roots of human communication to better appreciate its complexity.
4. Engage with scientific literature to stay informed about new discoveries in communication studies.
5. Foster an appreciation for the natural world and its influence on human development.

Chimpanzees are humans' closest living relatives. But does much of their communication resembles ours? According to a new study published earlier this week in the journal Current Biology, chimpanzees gesture back-and-forth in a similar way to how humans take turns speaking. The research presents an intriguing possibility that this style of communication may have evolved before humans split off from great apes, and tells researchers more about how turn-taking evolved.

People

Gal Badihi

Guest Name(s):

Elsa Chang

Content Warnings:

None

Anthropic
This message comes from NPR sponsor Anthropic. Clawed by anthropic is generative AI for everyone, offering groundbreaking intelligence. Join thousands of enterprises and stay at the frontier of AI. Learn more@anthropic.com clawed this episode is brought.

Synchrony Bank
To you by Synchrony bank. There's talking about saving and there's doing it. Synchrony bank empowers you to tackle your savings goals with a newsworthy 4.75% APY on their high yield savings account. Enjoy flexible access to your money and knowing it's earning a great rate with no monthly fees or minimums, it's never been easier to take control of your financial future. Go to synchronybank.com.

NPR
Npr member, FDIC, you're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Regina Barber
Hey, short waivers. Regina Barber here. And this time, our news roundup buddy is the one and the only, Elsa Chang.

Elsa Chang
Woo woo, Elsa Shark. Cheering for myself over here.

Regina Barber
We're so excited for you to come play with us. We love having you on. It's been a long time.

Elsa Chang
I love playtime with you guys.

Regina Barber
And we have our fabulous co host, distraordinaire Emily Kwong.

Emily Kwong
Oh, thank you. Hi, Gina.

Regina Barber
Okay, as you both know, we're gonna share three science stories in the news that have caught our attention recently.

Elsa Chang
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wanna say the first one, we have got chimpanzee gestures revealing things about communication, how oxygen is created at.

Regina Barber
The bottom of the ocean.

Emily Kwong
Yeah. And how a computer program may warn people before a huge rogue wave hits.

Regina Barber
All of that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

NPR
This message comes from NPR sponsor Greenlight. Want to teach your kids financial literacy with Greenlight, kids and teens use a debit card of their own. While parents can keep an eye on kids spending and savings in the app. Get your first month free@greenlight.com. nPR this message comes from Apple TV original podcasts presenting my devo from the producers of Anything for Selena and the Pulitzer Prize winning podcast Suave comes Mydivo, a podcast about roots dive into the legendary life, music and lasting influence of Latin America's most prolific songwriter and showman, Juan Gabriel, El Divo du Juarez, hosted by Maria Garcia. This is Mydivo, an Apple original podcast produced by Futuro Studios. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts support.

Anthropic
For NPR and the following message come from indeed, when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search. Match with indeed. Get a dollar 75. Sponsored job credit@indeed.com shortwave terms and conditions apply.

Regina Barber
All right, Elsa, you're our guest. We want to make you feel welcome, you know, happy. Which topic do you want to start with first?

Elsa Chang
Well, of course I want to start with the gesticulating chimpanzees, like.

Regina Barber
Right.

Elsa Chang
Let me ask, do they use their hands as much as I do to communicate?

Regina Barber
Okay.

Emily Kwong
Yeah, chimps definitely do. I mean, they don't have full blown language like we do, so gestures are really important for communication. Can I show you a clip of.

Elsa Chang
Oh, yes, that, please.

Emily Kwong
Okay, so these are two chimpanzees in a tree. They just had some conflict. And you can see that one chimp reaches for the other chimps hand, like, I'm sorry. And after a pause, the other chimp gently taps their hand back.

Elsa Chang
It looks so tender. I'm watching this like they're really making up. Is that happening?

Regina Barber
Yeah. I mean, maybe so, like, gestural exchanges like this are the topic of a recent paper in the journal current Biology. Gal Badihi is a. A postdoctoral research fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the lead author of this paper.

Gal Badihi
And my part was the east african chimpanzees.

Regina Barber
Sweeping an enormous data set, Gal looked at exchanges among five wild chimpanzee populations. Usually these exchanges had, like, two parts, hand reach, hand tap back. But sometimes these exchanges had up to seven parts, which was super exciting to.

Gal Badihi
See because they seem to have this back and forth in a face to face communicative setup that kind of resembles human conversations a little bit more.

Elsa Chang
That's so cool. And they're sure that it has nothing to do with the sounds that they're uttering towards each other. It's just the gestures.

Emily Kwong
Well, they are making sounds, but the gestures is what they were really paying attention to because of the pacing of the gestures. Like, the back and forth was really similar to human conversation. The pause between a gesture and a gestural response averaged to about 120 milliseconds. It was really fast.

Elsa Chang
Okay, well, how close is that to human response?

Emily Kwong
Yeah, conversational turns in humans average to about 200 milliseconds across language.

Elsa Chang
No way.

Emily Kwong
All very rapid fire, all very fast.

Elsa Chang
I had no idea there was a rate. Anyway, if chimps are supposed to be, like, one of our closest living relatives. Right. Like, does this reveal anything about the evolution of how humans communicate?

Emily Kwong
It presents an intriguing possibility. Yeah. That this kind of back and forth communication may have evolved before humans split off from great apes. We don't know for sure, but several primatologists I spoke to who were not a part of the study all felt this was an important contribution to understanding how turn taking and communication dynamics evolved. No language required.

Elsa Chang
That is so fascinating. Okay, now we're gonna take a sharp turn and move to oxygen on the seafloor. I take it that that is a weird thing, right? Otherwise, we would not be talking about it.

Regina Barber
Yeah. So most of our oxygen is created through photosynthesis. That's when, you know, plants take in light, water and carbon dioxide, and then they make like sugar and oxygen.

Emily Kwong
But for over a decade, scientists were aware of traces of oxygen at the bottom of the ocean, like 3 miles down, where there's no light, no photosynthesis. So where did this oxygen come from?

And a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience may have an answer. It shows that oxygen produced without light, called dark oxygen, could be coming from bits of metal in the deep ocean.

Elsa Chang
Wait, metal? What kind of metal is in the deep sea? Like, how did it get all the way down there?

Emily Kwong
Its these clumps of metals like nickel, manganese, cobalt, iron, that form these nodules on the seafloor. And they grow on top of stuff that falls to the bottom, like shark teeth. Yeah.

Regina Barber
I talked to physical chemist Franz Geiger about this, and hes one of the papers co authors, and he studied these clumps of metal in the lab. He specified its not a rock. And these nodules grow 1 years, and these are a few centimeters big. So these clumps of metal accumulated over millions and millions of years.

Elsa Chang
Whoa.

Franz Geiger
Really, really slow game of tetris.

Elsa Chang
Okay, so these clumps of metal grow very, very slowly. They glom together, and how are they producing oxygen? Like I thought, that is what plants do, right?

Regina Barber
So preliminary experiments suggest it's partly through electrolysis of seawater. So electric current in the middle chunks splits ocean water h two o into hydrogen and oxygen. But the sensors they used only detect oxygen, so they need more data before they can be like, sure, this is happening.

Elsa Chang
That's super cool.

Regina Barber
Yeah. It was surprising, actually, to the researchers, but there was another surprise that happened along the way. Franz almost lost the nodules. He got an email from customs about the package the nodules were in, and they said that soil imports aren't allowed.

Franz Geiger
And they told him the package will be destroyed. And I was like, what? I was in a faculty meeting when that happened.

Elsa Chang
Oh, dang. Customs. Yeah.

Emily Kwong
Well, okay. So he then, like, scoured the shipping rules and found that soil of oceanic origins can be imported without any issues in this, save the nodules.

Elsa Chang
Sample soil of oceanic origin. Loophole yes. Oh, yeah.

Emily Kwong
Your legal background is coming through.

Elsa Chang
Yes.

I want to stay in the ocean. Our final stories about waves gone rogue. What the heck, guys?

Regina Barber
Yeah, so rogue waves are these abnormally large waves that seem to come out of nowhere and they endanger ships at sea. Our colleague Nell Greenfield Boyden reported that advances in AI could someday help predict them.

Elsa Chang
Huh. Okay, so when you say abnormally large waves, like, how big are we talking?

Emily Kwong
For a wave to be rogue, it has to be over twice the size of the surrounding waves at a given time. So it depends on the size of the waves in the area. For centuries, scientists thought these waves were a sailing myth, until a scientific instrument managed to record one that measured 84ft.

Elsa Chang
Whoa.

Regina Barber
Yeah. And rogue waves are dangerous. They can damage ships infrastructure, cause power failures and really hurt people. A cruise ship passenger died and others were injured when a freak wave hit the Viking Polaris in 2022.

Elsa Chang
Oh, my God. Thats terrible.

Emily Kwong
Yeah. Yeah. Theres no way of predicting them, but a new study suggests that actually it may be possible to use information from floating buoys to give people some advance warning. So researchers have developed a computer system that correctly predicted 73% of these rogue waves five minutes before they occurred, which is valuable. It's like an earthquake warning.

With some time, oil rig workers or ship passengers can seek shelter, perform emergency shutdowns, or evacuate. If people on the ocean had a little more time, that would help.

Elsa Chang
Wow. Well, how did these researchers figure out how to predict these waves?

Emily Kwong
Yeah.

Regina Barber
So a researcher with the University of Maryland, Bala Balachandran, and his colleagues trained a neural network using data from 172 buoys off the coast of the continental US and the Pacific islands.

Emily Kwong
All of that data helped train the computer system to recognize waves that occurred right before a rogue wave happened and also to distinguish them from waves that weren't followed by a rogue wave.

Regina Barber
The scientists say they still have to improve the system's accuracy, but this could be the start of a powerful tool that could even lead to better forecasting for other extreme events.

Elsa Chang
That's pretty awesome.

Emily Kwong
Yeah, it really is.

Regina Barber
And, Elsa, thank you so much for hanging out with us. You're always welcome. You're always amazing.

Elsa Chang
Thank you. I always feel welcome.

I love it here.

Emily Kwong
This is the good place.

Elsa Chang
It is the good place.

Emily Kwong
You can catch more of Elsa doing her day job hosting the news on. Consider this NPR's afternoon news podcast.

Regina Barber
Before we head out, a quick shout out to our shortwave plus listeners. We appreciate you and we thank you for supporting our show. Short wave plus helps support our show. And if you're a regular listener. We'd love for you to join so you can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions. Find out more at plus dot npr.org shortwave.

Emily Kwong
This episode was produced by Kira Joachim and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher intagliotta.

Regina Barber
Emily, Rebecca, Rachel and I checked the facts and the audio engineer was Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez.

I'm Regina Barber.

Emily Kwong
And I'm Emily Kwong.

Regina Barber
Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPrdem.

Anthropic
This message comes from NPR sponsor American Express. Take your business further with the smart and flexible Amex business gold card. It's packed with benefits that help unlock more value from your business purchases. Learn more@americanexpress.com businessgoldcard support for NPR and.

IXL Learning
The following message come from IXL learning. IXL learning uses advanced algorithms to give the right help to each kid no matter the age or personality. Get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when you sign up today@ixcel.com. nprehood.