When people talk to each other, their conversations usually include many fast twists. Humans do not naturally talk in Shakespearean soliloquies, but by regularly interrupting and wildly gesticulating. The conventional wisdom is that our chats will take major turns roughly every 200 milliseconds — and new research in the journal Current Biology reveals that chimpanzees do the same thing.
"Chimpanzees also engage in rapid signal-to-signal turn-taking during face-to-face gestural exchanges" to roughly the same extent as humans, the authors write. "This correspondence between human and chimpanzee face-to-face communication points to shared underlying rules in communication." The authors speculate that this could be due to chimpanzees and humans sharing the same ancestors or because they coincidentally developed similar strategies for coordinating interactions and managing competition to communicate.
