Chatty Chimps take their turn to 'speak'

Have you ever found you can't get a word in when chatting with your friends?

That's because humans are fast talkers, taking just 200 milliseconds between turns to speak.

A millisecond is a thousandth of a second.

Well, new research has shown that chimpanzees are just as chatty, too!

Scientists found that - just like humans - chimps wait for only a fraction of a second before replying and sometimes interrupt each other.

Chimps mostly communicate - or chat - by using gestures including hand movements and facial expressions.

Scientists who study these exchanges detail found that they took "fast-paced turns" when they exchanged information and also occasionally interrupted one another.

By examining thousands of instances of wild chimpanzees communicating with each other, Prof Cat Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews and her colleagues were able to time the animals' conversations.

“It’s amazing to see how close the chimpanzee and human timings were," Cat said.

Their findings are published in the journal Current Biology

As part of investigating the evolutionary origins of communication, the researchers have spent decades observing and recording the behaviour of five communities of wild chimpanzees in the forests of Uganda and Tanzania.

They have logged and translated more than 8,000 gestures from over 250 individual animals.

Lead researcher Dr Gal Badihi, also at the University of St Andrews, explained that gestures allowed the chimpanzees to avoid arguments and fights.

“So one chimpanzee could gesture to another that they want food, and the other might give them food or, if they feel less generous, respond by gesturing for them to go away."

He said that future studies "will be a great way to better understand when and why our conversational rules evolved," he said.