It’s not twerking. It’s not salsa or breaking. You might put it somewhere between vogueing and the robot. Whatever you want to call it, the distinctive performance style of a female gibbon is a dance, researchers say.
Kai Caspar, a zoologist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany, and colleagues analyzed the stylized movements of certain gibbons. They found that the key characteristics of human dance are also present in the gibbons’ choreography. The findings have been posted online ahead of publication in the journal Primates.
Gibbons are long-armed apes that live in Asian tropical forests. Dr. Caspar became interested in their dancing when he was trying to learn how gibbons in zoos responded to a mirror. The apes didn’t show recognition of their reflections — but they did show off their moves.
“The body becomes stiff, and then these robot-dance-like movements commence,” Dr. Caspar said.
Earlier research had described hundreds of dances by four wild female gibbons in China. The gibbons were living in groups that each had two females but only one adult male. Peering up into the treetops, the researchers saw the females seeming to use dance to solicit their male’s attention. That male sometimes reacted to dances by grooming the female, or mating with her.
To study dances in more gibbon species, Dr. Caspar teamed up with Camille Coye, a primatologist at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, and Pritty Patel-Grosz, a linguistics professor at the University of Oslo who studies dance and gesture.
Dr. Patel-Grosz said they defined dance as an intentional movement that’s rhythmic and doesn’t serve a physical purpose, like walking or scratching an itch does.
The team surveyed people who worked with a group of species called crested gibbons about whether they had ever observed the animals dancing. They also collected and analyzed videos from zoos and other facilities.
All of the dancing gibbons were adult females, and they usually performed with their backs to the viewer. In the videos, the lack of physical purpose was clearly there: The apes swayed, dipped and posed bizarrely. The rhythm was there, too. And the movements were clearly no accident. “Those key traits are shared between human and gibbon dance,” Dr. Caspar said.
Often, the dancing ape looked over her shoulder or otherwise checked to make sure her viewer — another gibbon, or a human keeper — was watching. The scientists don’t yet know why gibbons dance toward humans; they may be seeking attention or anticipating food.
A crested gibbon’s performance “may not necessarily exhibit all of the properties that we commonly associate with human dance,” Dr. Patel-Grosz said. She added that we wouldn’t expect it to, because 20 million years of evolution separate us.
For instance, dancing in humans happens across cultures, genders and ages — even young toddlers will spontaneously bounce their diapered bottoms to music. But researchers have seen only mature female gibbons dancing. And the activity has nothing to do with sound or music. Even though gibbons also sing elaborate songs, they dance in silence.
Klaus Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland who studies primate cognition and wasn’t involved in the research, was not surprised to hear about apes that dance.
“Ritualized movements as part of courtship displays (i.e., ‘dances’) are fairly common in the animal kingdom,” Dr. Zuberbühler said in an email. There are dancing birds, fishes, insects and spiders.
However, he added, in most of these cases, the dancing animal is a male trying to attract a female. It’s more unusual for female animals to dance. It’s also “more puzzling” for dancing to happen between committed partners, he said; many of the gibbon species in the new study are monogamous.
Some researchers have looked for dance-like behaviors in other apes. However, “in chimps and bonobos, if you ask me, there’s nothing comparable to human dance,” Dr. Caspar said. He thinks future studies of the vogueing gibbons may bring insights about the evolution of dance in our own species.
He also thinks that gibbons, close human relatives with unique and complex behaviors, are underappreciated by scientists. “I really hope,” Dr. Caspar said, “that this could help move them somewhat more into the spotlight.”
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