Chimpanzees carry the rhythm in the body - La Provincia
Researchers at the University of Kyoto have shown that chimpanzees they possess a skill as human as that of dance spontaneously when they listen to music.
Music tends to make people move. Whether playing a rhythm, swinging or dancing directly, people respond. Previous research has shown that some animals, such as cockatoos, also tend to move When they listen to music.
In this new effort, published in PNAS, scientists Yuko Hattori and Masaki Tomonaga relied on a recent chimpanzee report dancing spontaneously in a kind of conga line. They noted that previous research has also found that chimpanzees participate in dance behaviors sometimes when it rains or when they are near a waterfall.
The initial experiment of the researchers consisted of try to teach an adult female to keep up; That experiment did not go as planned, but the researchers noticed that another nearby chimpanzee started dancing every time they played music. Intrigued, the researchers played music for a group of chimpanzees (three adult males and four females) and discovered that all chimpanzees responded to music by moving in the form of dance, although the degree to which they danced varied widely among them.
In general, they discovered that males tended to dance more than females. They also discovered that chimpanzees had different movements: some swayed, others hit the walls of their enclosure and one even hit their foot. They also noticed that some of the males hooted along with the music.
To learn more, the researchers isolated one of them, a male named Akira. He was chosen because he danced more among those the team was studying. He was subjected to periods of piano music with a repetitive bass note for 24 days. He was also subjected to random notes to find out if he was responding to music or rhythm. Investigators report that Akira danced whenever music was played, regardless of his tempo, and he danced the same.
The researchers could not explain why music made chimpanzees dance, but they suggested that additional studies could help to learn about the evolution of dance in humans.
