The rapid back-and-forth dance during face-to-face conversations isn’t unique to us humans. A new study suggests that while chimpanzees generally prefer gestures to sounds, their communication is just as fast as ours and reflects similar cultural patterns. By observing the timing of gestures in wild East African chimpanzee communities, an international team of researchers found responses after pauses of up to a second. Some responses occurred almost immediately when chimps interrupted each other, just as we do during a heated argument.

“We found that the timing of chimpanzee gestures and human speech is similar and very rapid, suggesting that similar evolutionary mechanisms drive these social communicative interactions,” explains lead author Gal Badihy, an ethologist at the University of St Andrews in the UK.

This means that our way of communicating may have emerged early in our evolutionary history, before our closest living relatives, humans and chimpanzees, diverged millions of years ago. By examining more than 8,500 examples of gestures from 252 individual chimpanzees, Badihi and his colleagues found that chimpanzee activities reflected not only similar human communication patterns but also differences in communication across cultures.

“We saw small differences between different chimpanzee populations, which again parallels what we see in humans; there are small cultural differences in speech rate: in some cultures people speak slower or faster,” Badihi says.

Researchers observed that Uganda’s Kanyawara chimpanzees ‘talk’ faster compared to the Sonso chimpanzees living in the nearby Budongo Forest.

“In humans, the ‘slower’ response is in the Danes and in eastern chimpanzees, the Sonso community in Uganda,” says University of St Andrews primatologist Kathryn Hobeiter.

Previous research has found other similarities in the way we communicate. Just as our words form sentences to convey meaning, chimpanzees often combine short gestures to create longer strings of meaning.

The researchers want to learn more about what these chimps are saying to each other, and they suspect many of the gestures may be requests. The researchers identified 58 different versions of the “let’s play” gesture that chimps use in the wild.

“Communication helps chimpanzees avoid conflict and coordinate actions with each other,” Badihi told the PA news agency. “Their gestures allow them to communicate over short distances to achieve social goals in the moment.”

“In this way, one chimpanzee can show another that they want food, and the other can give them food or, if they’re feeling less generous, respond with a gesture to leave.”

In one observation, a chimpanzee named Monica lay down after a physical confrontation with another chimpanzee named Ursus. Ursus returned to reassure her by demonstrating how gestures could be used to restore harmony. So while there are still many obvious differences between chimpanzee and human languages, the underlying rules for both systems are similar.

“We still don’t know when or why these speech structures evolved,” Hobeiter says. “To answer this question, we need to study communication in more distantly related species so we can determine whether it is unique to apes or whether we have it in common with other highly social species, such as elephants or crows.” The study was published in: Current Biology.