Humans learned small talk from primates
Princeton University researchers report that we probably learned small talk from our primate ancestors as a technique to form closer bonds.
The team studied ringtailed lemurs and found out that aside from grooming each other, lemurs also bond through chatter. In fact, lemurs reserved vocal exchanges for those that they groomed most frequently.
Lemurs vocalize to essentially “groom-at-a-distance” and keep in touch when the group members they’re closest with get separated such as when foraging for food, said first author Ipek Kulahci, who received her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton.
“Our results indicate that when animals respond to each other’s vocalizations, they are in fact also working on maintaining their social bonds,” said Kulahci, who worked with her co-authors and doctoral advisers Asif Ghazanfar, a professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and Daniel Rubenstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
“By exchanging vocalizations, the animals are reinforcing their social bonds even when they are away from each other,” Kulahci said. “This social selectivity in vocalizations is almost equivalent to how we humans keep in regular touch with our close friends and families, but not with everyone we know.”
The findings could have implications for how scientists understand the evolution of primate vocalizations and human speech, Ghazanfar explained. Existing theories of language evolution suggest that vocal exchanges between primates evolved with group size, he said. As group size increased, grooming to form social bonds became too time consuming, so speech developed to save time while still expressing familiarity.
Ghazanfar and his colleagues found, however, that vocalizations occurred independently of group size. The lemurs the researchers studied groomed more as their numbers increased, but did not necessarily vocalize more. These findings show a direct connection between grooming — or familiarity — and vocalization not found before, Ghazanfar said.
The Princeton research suggests that talking, even just casually, is an evolutionary tool for establishing closeness, Ghazanfar said.
“Talking is a social lubricant, not necessarily done to convey information, but to establish familiarity,” he said. “I think these vocalizations are equivalent to the chitchat that we do. People think that conversations are like exchanging mini-lectures full of information. But most of the time we have conversations and forget them when we’re done because they’re performing a purely social function.”
