The Guardian reports:

Akira stands up and sways about. Pal is big on clapping. Ai is into tapping her foot, while Gon bangs and slaps the walls.

Not the latest teen band sensation, but a spectacle far more impressive: the moves of a group of chimpanzees that scientists believe shed light on the prehistoric origins of human dancing.

The researchers in Kyoto filmed the chimps performing the movements in a music booth attached to their enclosure where the apes could go to rock out to piano sounds played in the room.

None of the chimps had been taught to groove, and they received no rewards for doing so in the study, but regardless they broke out into spontaneous bodily expression when the beats started.

“Chimpanzees dance to some extent in the same way as humans,” said Yuko Hattori, a researcher at Kyoto University who studied the dancing chimps. Most of the apes swayed their bodies, though claps and foot taps featured too, primarily among the females.

While dance has a rich and ancient history in humans, it is considered all but absent in non-human primates. The most similar behaviour seen in the wild are chimpanzees’ “rain dances” and waterfall displays. This month, researchers at Warwick University reported chimps in Saint Louis Zoological Park in Missouri moving in what looked uncannily like a conga, but the apes had no musical accompaniment. [Continue reading…]