If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different. Chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds (“ha” or “hee”). Listen to a recording and you wouldn’t identify it as laughter – it’s more like a handsaw cutting wood. But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny.
Apes make these noises during play or when tickled, and they’re accompanied by distinctive open-mouthed “play faces”. Darwin himself noted the laugh-like noises of tickled chimps way back in 1872. Now, over a century later, Marina Davila Ross of the University of Portsmouth has used these noises to explore the evolutionary origins of our own laughter.
Davila Ross tickled youngsters of all of the great apes and recorded the calls they make (listen to MP3s of a tickled chimp, gorilla, bonobo and orang-utan). She used these recordings to build an acoustic family tree, showing the relationships between the calls. Scientists regularly construct such trees to illustrate the relationships between species based on the features of their bodies or the sequences of their genes. But this is the first time that anyone has applied the same technique to an emotional expression.
The tree linked the great apes in exactly the way you would expect based on genes and bodies. To Ross, this clearly shows that even though human laughter sounds uniquely different, it shares a common origin with the vocals of great apes. It didn’t arise out of nowhere, but gradually developed over 10-16 million years of evolution by exaggerating the acoustics of our ancestors. At the very least, we should now be happy to describe the noises made by tickled apes as laughter without accusations of anthropomorphism, and to consider “laughter” as a trait that applies to primates and other animals
Immunity to viral infections sounds like a good thing, but it can come at a price. Millions of years ago, we evolved resistance to a virus that plagued other primates. Today, that virus is extinct, but our resistance to it may be making us more vulnerable to the present threat of HIV.
Many extinct viruses are not completely gone. Some members of a group called retroviruses insinuated themselves into our DNA and became a part of our genetic code. Indeed, a large proportion of the genomes of all primates consists of the embedded remnants of ancient viruses. Looking at these remnants is like genetic archaeology, and it can tell us about infections both past and present.
When retroviruses (such as HIV, right) infect a cell, they insert their own DNA into their host’s genome, using it as a base of operations. From there, the virus can pop out again and make new copies of itself, re-infect its host or move on to new cells.
If it manages to infect an egg or sperm cell, the virus could pass onto the next generation. Hidden inside the embryo’s DNA, it becomes replicated trillions of times over and ends up in every single one of the new individual’s cells.
These hitchhikers are called ‘endogenous retroviruses‘. While they could pop out at any time, they quickly gain mutations in their DNA that knocks out their ability to infect. Unable to move on, they become as much a part of the host’s DNA as its own genes.
In 2005, a group of scientists led by Evan Eichler compared endogenous retroviruses in different primates and found startling differences. In particular, chimps and gorillas have over a hundred copies of the virus PtERV1 (or Pan troglodytes endogenous retrovirus in full). Our DNA has none at all, and this is one of the largest differences between our genome and that of chimps.