The human cognitive tools that help us learn humor may date back at least 13 million years.
By Kasha Patel, February 13, 2024
Aisha grabbed a rope hanging in her zoo pen and carefully swung it at her father's head below. It skimmed the hairs on the top of his head, then dangled in front of his face, but he didn't react. The young orangutan tossed it again, but still no response. So Aisha upped her game. She climbed down the rope and swung in front of him until she bumped him with her body.
This is how an orangutan jokes around.
If you have ever watched a group of great apes at the zoo or elsewhere, the primates are dynamic. They pick dirt and insects off one another, play games and get into scuffles. Sometimes, it even looks like our relatives pull pranks, but that behavior has never been formally examined — until now.
For the first time, researchers have detailed how great apes playfully tease. They found that four species of great apes joke around, suggesting the human cognitive tools that help us learn humor may date back at least 13 million years.
"Playful teasing is a thing," said Erica Cartmill, an author of the study. The capacity to joke bring up a lot of questions "about what animals understand about other animals' minds, expectations and the strength of their relationships."
Funny primate behavior isn’t a bananas observation. Famed primatologist Jane Goodall described young chimpanzees disturbing older chimpanzees that were resting, and ones playfully jumping, biting and pulling others’ hair.
“This is not a behavior that was never observed,” said Isabelle Laumer, who is the lead author of the new study and studies critically endangered great apes. “It was just that we were the first ones that really systematically had a look at the playful teasing behaviors and studied them and just tried to describe them.”
Laumer and her colleagues watched 75 hours of orangutan, chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla interactions at the San Diego and Leipzig zoos. They specifically followed juveniles and analyzed spontaneous social interactions that seemed playful or provocative. The team observed the teaser’s actions, movements and facial expressions, as well as how the teased primate reacted.
They found 18 different types of good-natured teasing, where an ape provoked another unsuspecting ape in a playful manner. The most common behaviors across all four species were poking, hitting, hindering movement, body slamming and pulling on another’s body part — all behaviors observed among humans, too.
“Sometimes, it also involved elements of surprise,” said Laumer, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. “The teaser would actually sneak behind the back of the target and then surprise the target with a teasing action, like a hit.”
After the ape would start teasing, they also looked to see how their target responded - just like how a human child would poke an adult and see how they react. If there was no response, the ape would try again and sometimes even escalate the situation.
Playful teasing is distinct from other "play" behavior, in which apes play games with one another, Laumer said. Play is reciprocal, but playful teasing is usually one-sided, in which a teaser initiates an action toward a target. Play usually occurs between individuals of the same size, but juveniles usually joked around with adults instead of other juveniles.
Good-natured teasing differs from aggressive behavior because of its positive to neutral reception, Cartmill, a researcher at Indiana University, said. Most of the time, the teased ape ignored the behavior at first and would eventually go away. Apes getting teased got angry in less than 5 percent of cases, signaling that they understood this provocative behavior was not poor-spirited.
Objective observations of animal behavior can be tricky because humans tend to project their own experiences on the situations. But the researchers “give an extremely significant contribution by studying the phenomenon with a systematic and controlled study,” said comparative psychologist Maria Elide Vanutelli, who was not involved in the study.
“The knowledge we had about this specific phenomenon was almost exclusively on a purely anecdotal level,” said Vanutelli, a psychology and neuroscience researcher at University of Milan-Bicocca. “The study of these behaviors in animals provides an extremely innovative (as well as interesting and entertaining) way of understanding how other species depict the world, and what they find ‘amusing.’”
Playful teasing can be seen as entertainment, but others say it also can help juveniles better understand their social partners. For instance, a young ape learns how much they can joke around with another individual before they get a reaction, providing vital information about growing up within a social group and establishing hierarchies, said primatologist Marina Davila-Ross, who was not involved in the study.
Understanding hierarchies and social norms, according to some theoretical perspectives, could even be a precursor to sarcasm, which incorporates mechanisms of aggression and denigration, Vanutelli said.
“Choosing this specific aspect of humor (understood in a broad sense) helps us to highlight how a behavior that we judge as childish and rather basic as playful teasing is actually accompanied by extremely complex and sophisticated cognitive skills,” Vanutelli said.
Given this playful teasing is seen in the great apes, simple joking could have been present in our last common ancestor. Styles of teasing — such as poking or pulling hair — probably weren’t passed down genetically, such as eye color, Cartmill said. But the cognitive functions that allow these behaviors to persist, like a social interest in learning about others or the ability to recognize individuality, are probably biologically grounded.
There are still many unanswered questions, such as differences in playful teasing among different species or if it’s only a predisposed trait for social animals.
But the next time a child is poking you, you may consider that even chimpanzees will think that’s funny.
(Sources: The Washington Post)
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