We think of animals as savages because they bite and throw food, but their interactions can be surprisingly polite. New research seeks to narrow the chasm in our knowledge of human and animal communication. It looks like it is not as wide as it seems.
One of the biggest discoveries was that many species of animals communicate using an alternating system of sounds, just like people conducting a conversation.
Whether it's the chirping of birds or the hooting of chimpanzees, rotation turns out to be a fundamental part of communication in many animal species. The researchers believe this may help unravel how a more complex language evolved, with a basic form of the language system in turn.
Although there are many similarities between human communication and turn-by-turn communication of animals, the timing between cues varies. For example, a person has a time window between replicas in a dialogue, on average, from 0 to 500 milliseconds. In animals, this interval varies from 50 milliseconds, as in the songs of the brown-tailed shrub wren, to 5000 milliseconds between the calls of common marmoset monkeys.
The most incredible thing is that some animals even express dissatisfaction when they are interrupted, and try very hard to avoid this in communication, so as not to offend their interlocutor.
“European starlings try to avoid chirping together,” the study authors said. - If such a situation arises, the birds calm down or fly away altogether. Perhaps such behavior is considered in this species a violation of generally accepted rules of communication."
This large international project, recently published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, included a large-scale review of the evidence gleaned from observations of the communication of various animal species. Despite the fact that there are many studies on this topic, they are mostly fragmented and often tied to one species, which makes it difficult to carry out interspecific comparisons.
First, some possible comparisons were hampered by differences in terminology. A common form of communication in birds is known as vocalization, where one of the couple begins to sing, and then the song is continued by the other. Birds can pass their turn to each other several times until the song is over. It turned out that monkeys use a very similar system, but scientists have always called the monkey roll "antiphonic singing."
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"The ability to directly compare the communication skills of animals with the origin of language is severely limited by the lack of data, differences in terminology, the structure of the methodology, the studied environment," said Simone Pica, representative of the Primatology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "Such a collaborative program will allow researchers to trace the evolutionary history of such an important alternate communication and tackle the long-standing question of the origins of human language."
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