The bonobos seem to be saying “Hello” and “Goodbye” to each other

You don’t approach a colleague without some sort of greeting, and you don’t end conversations just by turning your heel. There are rules to the game of social behavior, and now a research team that studies chimpanzees and bonobos says these great apes have social habits that are very similar to what we humans call ‘hello’ and ‘ goodbye “.

The research team observed more than 2,000 interactions between chimpanzees as well as bonobos, another species of monkey closely related to humans. These greetings and farewells — which occurred about 78% of the time in chimpanzees and 90% of the time in bonobos engaged in cooperative activities.-seem to come in the form of physical contact and glancing between individuals, whereby the animals in the shared action can confirm that everyone is on board. These “joint action phases,” as the researchers call them, appear to be a fairly common aspect of social behavior in monkeys.

“Oddly enough, the model mirrored what we find in humans and what some people define as ‘social etiquette’ or ‘politeness’: when you interact with a good friend, you are less likely to put effort into communicating. politely. In bonobos, a similar pattern is evident in the structure of the joint action phases, ”said Raphael.a Heesen, a researcher at Durham University in England and lead author of the study, in an email.

The monkeys may want to make sure everything is cool before, for example, proceed with a chase – you don’t want to start brutality with someone who is not interestedbecause they might take it the wrong way. But the researchers cautioned against looking too much at monkey behaviors through the lens of how humans behave.

Among bonobos, the duration of interactions seemed contingent on social hierarchies within the group. The closer two individuals were to each other, the shorter the greetings and departures, the researchers found. The team postulated that bonobos might link social context in their interactions more than chimpanzees due to the different ways in which the two groups of monkeys organize themselves; bonobos have more egalitarian social hierarchies than chimpanzees, which are organize in row according to physical aggression.

In addition to eye contact, physical contact like touching, holding hands and shackling your head used to indicate the onset and cessation of joint actions, which were often play or grooming. Researchers are not yet sure how these different forms of thanks vary in their specific meanings, but they hope to identify nuances in future observations, which will also examine other great ape species, such as gorillas.

Chimpanzees and bonobos were a reasonable place to investigate the phenomena; the two species share over 98% of our DNA and diverged from us more recently on the evolutionary tree than the other apes. The fact that we are closely related is a boon for primatologists, anthropologists and social psychologists: ThThe social capacities we share (and those we do not) can inform when different traits may have evolved in a way that no fossil remains can.

Heesen said these entry and exit signals could change our understanding of the differences between our own species and other primates. “Shared intentionality was believed to be at the heart of human nature, enabling us to achieve long-term goals that we would not otherwise be attainable by a single individual,” she said. “The possibility that joint engagement as a process is present in our closest relatives sketches a picture of an evolving continuum in the evolution of social cognition and potentially challenges the long-held claim that engagement spouse is special for humans.

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