Phylogenetics Of Emotion? The Evolution Of Laughter In Apes
Thursday, June 4, 2009 - 16:42
in Biology & Nature
Like human infants, young apes are make noises when you tickle them. Is that really laughter? The answer to the question is yes, say researchers in Current Biology. The researchers analyzed the recorded sounds of tickle-induced vocalizations produced by infant and juvenile orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos, as well as those of human infants. A quantitative phylogenetic analysis of those acoustic data found that the best "tree" to represent the evolutionary relationships among those sounds matched the known evolutionary relationships among the five species based on genetics. The researchers said that the findings support a common evolutionary origin for the human and ape tickle-induced expressions. read more
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