Dancing chimpanzees?

December 13, 2019 12:18 PM

The first case of spontaneous whole-body entrainment between two chimpanzees could help reconstruct the proto-stages of hman dance

Another video view here. Nature article about the behavior.

posted by Transl3y (26 comments total)

When you study chimpanzees you can get away with paying to publish your open access article on just about anything.

"Human proto-dance, we argue, may have been rooted in mechanisms of social cohesion among small groups that might have granted stress-releasing benefits via gait-synchrony and mutual-touch. An external sound/musical beat may have been initially uninvolved. We discuss dance evolution as driven by ecologically-, socially- and/or culturally-imposed “captivity”.

I am rolling my eyes.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:32 PM on December 13, 2019 [11 favorites]

Sorry. For some additional context, this is an article in Nature Scientific Reports, which is a pay-to-publish open access journal. Lots of reasonable stuff is published there, but it doesn't have the "cachet" of publishing in nature.

And, for some additional additional context, this is an analysis of several videos of two individual captive chimpanzees engaging in what the authors themselves call stereotypic behavior - in other words, behaviors that are responses to stress and typically exhibited by animals raised in captivity in less-than-optimal environments. Things like the pacing of bears and big cats in zoos, over-grooming by primates in poor zoos, etc. This is not a behavior that I would argue has any bearing on the evolutionary origins of human dance.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:38 PM on December 13, 2019 [19 favorites]

This is not a behavior that I would argue has any bearing on the evolutionary origins of human dance.

Not to mention that since humans and chimps diverged from a common ancestor 7ish million years ago, there are limits to what their behavior can tell us about our ancient ancestor’s behavior considering that for 7ish million years they’ve been evolving too.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:48 PM on December 13, 2019 [12 favorites]

All I remember about chimps come from Jane Goodall videos, but if you asked me "Can chimps voluntarily move in bodily synchrony" like in the video, I would have said I don't know. This paper answers that, whether you want to call it proto-dance or something else. It doesn't matter if it was captivity-induced or even learned from watching their handlers or zoo humans, because the fact of the video is, allegedly, unprecedented data. It's not whether the behaviour is natural or not but the fact that they can display concurrent synchronized motion at a certain spatial and temporal scale, which from an AI complexity perspective is highly nontrivial. That's why the substance of the abstract explicitly talks about using statistical techniques to try and show it's not just independent motion like how pacing or mutual grooming would be.
posted by polymodus at 1:26 PM on December 13, 2019 [8 favorites]

Less proto-stages of human dance, more proto-stages of human marching. This looks nothing like dancing to me, but I guess chimp researchers know things that I don't. Marching, on the other hand...this looks a lot like that. Put some music to it and...
posted by Chuffy at 1:31 PM on December 13, 2019

I was looking up the words conga/Congo and the media is literally reporting this news as a proto congo-line.
posted by polymodus at 1:44 PM on December 13, 2019

That's a fair point, but the AI aspect of the data collection isn't, I would say, the main point they're making. They're using this as evidence for their argument that:

Human proto-dance, we argue, may have been rooted in mechanisms of social cohesion among small groups that might have granted stress-releasing benefits via gait-synchrony and mutual-touch... We discuss dance evolution as driven by ecologically-, socially- and/or culturally-imposed “captivity.”

And I don't think there's anything in these observations to warrant that sort of argument.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:50 PM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

So if I understand it's a stereotypical behavior and they just realized doing it together is also nice? (Those "stress release properties)?

What if this is just a new kind of worse stereotypical behavior called group stereotype that just has the whole group weaving around in sync til they all collapse?
posted by bleep at 2:58 PM on December 13, 2019

Thank god we developed butts.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 3:07 PM on December 13, 2019 [17 favorites]

Every day my dude.
posted by saladin at 3:25 PM on December 13, 2019 [9 favorites]

there are limits to what their behavior can tell us about our ancient ancestor’s behavior considering that for 7ish million years they’ve been evolving too.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 3:48 PM

EponyAHEM
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:36 PM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

*ba-dum-tish*
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:24 PM on December 13, 2019

Hey, I know I only dance when I'm trapped in less than optimal environments.
posted by asperity at 9:46 PM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

This could help reconstruct the first stages of human dance, back when early humans were held in a tiny prison and stared at constantly by noisy aliens who interfered with every aspect of their life and regularly caused mental and social problems they then mistook for natural behaviour.
posted by BinaryApe at 2:08 AM on December 14, 2019 [5 favorites]

Ok, maybe not dancing, but what's up with the laundry bags?
posted by joeyh at 4:33 AM on December 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

Proto-laundromat behavior.
posted by MtDewd at 4:50 AM on December 14, 2019 [3 favorites]

Burlap bags are one of the things they're given for enrichment - you can hide in them, use them to make nests, hold them while engaging in gait-synchrony ...
posted by ChuraChura at 5:21 AM on December 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

Accepting that the article is rather less than a scientific breakthrough, I read that music seems to have it's own memory center, and I keep thinking about how cool that is and how music and dance evolved. It's obviously hugely beneficial.

The chimp video needs to be set to the right music, not the usual DRM-free junk, but something fun.
posted by theora55 at 7:06 AM on December 14, 2019

Hi, sometimes-anthropologist, media literacy scholar, and African dance enthusiast here and AAAAAUGH did they HAVE to set this to African music, that is racist as _fuck_. You could set it to The Beautiful Blue Danube and it would be every bit as fascinating to watch, with additional Kubrick overtones. Fucking stop with the monkey=jungle=African music equation, yo.

From my anthropologist side... primate studies have long been a problematic old part of our discipline, involving a lot of unfortunate projection of human-ness onto apes and apeness onto humans. There's been plenty like this published over the past two centuries, even in "reputable" journals.

With the music and scholarly handwaving stripped out, from my dancer side... yeah, this is dancing! They're feeling it, we're feeling it as we watch them. All sorts of mirror neuron engagement. And I mean, hey, synchrony is not a 100% requirement of dancing anyway, even in couples dance like tango or salsa. But engagement of the other is. And wow these two are engaged. I want to get in line behind them and feel what this is all about.
posted by gusandrews at 1:15 PM on December 14, 2019 [5 favorites]

... Or maybe it's a protest march. well, it's never a protest march without some dancing, hey?
posted by gusandrews at 1:17 PM on December 14, 2019

(primatology is a perfectly valid and legitimate subdiscipline of anthropology)
posted by ChuraChura at 6:43 PM on December 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

(slytherin is also a perfectly valid and legitimate hogwarts house, just sayin, why yes I did go to teachers college where that metaphor for the four disciplines of anthropology was often made and yes our campus had parts that looked like hogwarts)
posted by gusandrews at 8:22 PM on December 14, 2019

All these comments, and not a single Dance Dance Evolution joke? C'mon people...
posted by fnerg at 12:33 AM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]

which from an AI complexity perspective is highly nontrivial
this seems like an argument built on the sand of assuming binary machine processes operate in any way analogous to live neurological processes?
Also what a lot of eponymous contributions
posted by glasseyes at 7:38 AM on December 15, 2019

Sorry. For some additional context, this is an article in Nature Scientific Reports, which is a pay-to-publish open access journal. Lots of reasonable stuff is published there, but it doesn't have the "cachet" of publishing in nature.

That's an... odd critique. I just had a paper accepted by NSR (today!) and the peer review process took months and was possibly the most intense review experience I've ever had. Saying it doesn't have the cachet of Nature is one of the problems with judging journals by cachet.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 6:50 AM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

Congratulations! I guess I was thinking about it from the perspective of a paper I'm on which was submitted to Nature and desk rejected but they told us to resubmit at NSR and it's being reviewed. They just have different scopes for research impact (especially from a primatology perspective. Most of my research isn't nearly impactful enough for either of those journals to take a first look at, never mind a second). Which, as you say, is the problem of judging journals by cachet.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:03 AM on December 17, 2019