Friday, June 5, 2009

What happens if you tickle a gorilla?

By tickling young gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans, researchers say they learned that all great apes laugh. Their findings suggest we inherited our own ability to laugh from the last common ancestor from which humans and great apes evolved, which lived 10 to 16 million years ago. Primatologist and psychologist Marina Davila Ross of the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth led a team that tickled the necks, feet, palms, and armpits of infant and juvenile apes as well as human babies. The team recorded more than 800 of the resulting giggles and guffaws. Source (via Boing Boing)