He says learning more about that could help reveal the function of laughter in human relationships. This raises a question: If these sounds are all laughter, what made humans develop our distinctive "ha ha ha" instead of something more like the panting of a chimp? "If human laughter has evolved in a somewhat different direction, then why did it do that? And why these features in particular?" asks Owren. "All these sounds do seem to have a common origin, evolutionarily speaking," says Owren, "and I am now comfortable calling them all laughter." Specific features of these sounds then got exaggerated or changed over evolutionary time, as the different apes emerged. The primordial laughlike sound of that common ancestor probably had long, slow, noisy calls. "The results suggest that the evolutionary origins of human laughter can be traced back at least 10 to 16 million years to the last common ancestor of humans and modern great apes," they write in their research report. They discovered a revealing pattern of similarities and differences among these five related species. ![]() Then, along with Elke Zimmermann, of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hannover, Germany, they compared what they'd found to the known evolutionary relationship between these apes and humans. ![]() To try and find out, she and Owren analyzed 11 different acoustic features in the recordings of tickled apes. "That was absolutely fascinating, how they responded to the caretakers when they were tickled," Davila Ross says.īut the question is, she says, when you listen to these ape sounds, "how can one really know that this is laughter?" But then a researcher named Marina Davila Ross, of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, came to his lab with recordings she had collected of 21 infant and juvenile orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, as well as three human babies.ĭavila Ross says going to zoos and watching the apes being tickled was an amazing experience, because they really seemed to love being tickled and, even though their sounds were odd, they looked like they were cracking up.
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