Giggling Apes May Help Us Understand How Speech Emerged, as We've Shared a Similar Laugh Pattern for 15 Million Years
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Discover how tickling apes and recording their bursts of laughter revealed a similar pattern to how humans laugh, while hinting at the origins of speech.
Jenny Lehmann is an Associate Editor at Discover Magazine who writes articles on microbiology, psychology, neurology, and zoology, and oversees the Piece of Mind column of the print issue.View Full Profile. Laughter is a universal language, but it may also be the evolutionary beginnings of language. As laughter isn’t just an act humans around the world cherish but a non-linguistic vocal expression shared by all living great apes, it offers a rare opportunity to trace the origins of vocal control that eventually led to speech and different languages in humans.
To understand how laughter has evolved over millions of years, researchers at the University of Warwick recorded and compared laughter in orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans. Described in their paper published in Communications Biology, they identified the same rhythmic pattern across all species, which led scientists to suggest that this form of vocal control, while laughing, was already present in our last shared ancestor 15 million years ago. “By comparing how different species laugh, we can see that a basic rhythmic structure has remained unchanged since our last common ancestor.
That's extraordinary,” said first study author Chiara De Gregorio, researcher with the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick, in a press statement. In their study, the researchers aimed to record spontaneous laughter, and because most of the participants weren’t human, or were simply too young (animals and humans were six months to seven years old), cracking a joke wouldn’t do the job. Instead, the team used playful interactions, such as rough-and-tumble play or tickling, and recorded the specimens' bursts of laughter in their home environments, where they would feel safe and relaxed.
The 140 laughter sequences the team collected were analyzed for rhythmic structure and intervals between laughs, rather than focusing on pitch or intensity. One result was that the basic rhythm remained constant across species, while human laughter stood out for its speed, variability, and adaptability to context, all hallmarks of speech. Laughter is an undeniably important part of human communication and, therefore, highly complex.
Spontaneous laughter, while probably the most enjoyable, exists alongside voluntary laughter, which is coordinated and adapted to certain social situations, such as timed laughter in conversation or nervous laughter after an uncomfortable situation. Although marked by the same rhythm, the latter forms are consciously controlled with a very specific goal, like communicating one’s emotions or intentions.
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