Tickling experiments prove apes can laugh
Researchers believe they may have discovered the origins of human laughter after conducting tickling experiments on young apes including bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans and chimpanzees.
Marina Davila-Ross of the University of Portsmouth in the UK said apes and humans had demonstrated common reactions and acoustic responses to being tickled which supported the idea that there is laughter in apes.
“It is likely that great apes use laughter sounds to interact in similar ways to humans,” Davila-Ross told the New Scientist.
That suggests that laughter is also an ape trait and may have a common origin for all primate species, evolving gradually over the last 16 million years prior to the split between human and ape ancestors around 6 million years ago.
The research also suggested that gorillas and bonobos have some control over their breathing when laughing – a trait considered essential to the development of human speech.
“At a minimum, one can conclude that it is appropriate to consider ‘laughter’ to be a cross-species phenomenon, and that it is therefore not anthropomorphic to use this term for tickling-induced vocalizations produced by the great apes,” the researchers wrote.