Researchers filmed the child’s development for seven months, starting when she was 11 months old, while the apes were taped from 12 months of age to 26 months. The human child grew up in her family’s home, where her parents facilitated her learning. There, Panpanzee and Panbanisha were taught to communicate with their human caregivers using gestures, noises and lexigrams, abstract symbols that represent words. The apes were raised together at the Georgia State University Language Research Center in Atlanta, where researchers study language and cognitive processes in chimps, monkeys and humans. The child stars of these videos included a chimpanzee named Panpanzee, a bonobo called Panbanisha and a human girl, identified as GN. To pick up on these behaviors, the team studied hree babies of differing species through videos taken over a number of months. Such gestures, which seemed to be innate in all three species, precede and eventually lead to the development of language in humans, the researchers say. They also raise their arms up, a motion indicating that they want to be picked up, in the same manner. Members of all three species reach with their arms and hands for objects or people, and point with their fingers or heads.
Using video analysis, a team of UCLA researchers found that human, chimpanzee and bonobo babies make similar gestures when interacting with caregivers. Nonetheless, certain basic things-such as the urge to cry out in pain, an increase in blood pressure when feeling anger, even shrugging when we don’t understand something-cross cultures.Ī new study, published today in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, compares such involuntary responses, but with an added twist: Some observable behaviors aren’t only universal to the human species, but to our closest relatives too-chimpanzees and bonobos. This hypothesis didn’t quite pan out-last year, researchers poked a hole in the idea by showing that the expression of emotions such as anger, happiness and fear wasn’t universal (PDF). In the 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, the naturalist argued that people from different cultures exhibit any given emotion through the same facial expression. Thirteen years after the release of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published another report on the evolution of mankind.
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