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| Dancing chimp colourbox.com/ |
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| Dancing Chimp. depositphotos.com |
The study of chimpanzees by Psychologists throws light on the development of dance over a period of time. Humans learnt to respond to rhythm and move together in sync through an evolutionary process.
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| Dancing Chimps. .dailymail.com. |
Above image: Researchers found that the chimps were able to move in sync for an extended period of time with each of the pair taking it in turns to 'lead'........................
Dance, is an iconic expression of human's various emotions. The performing art form consists of sequences of movement that may be either improvised or purposefully selected to stay within a style. No doubt such movements have symbolic as well as aesthetic value. Normally choreography. its repertoire of movements. place of origin and the historic period define and categorize the dance Examples Indian classical dances like Kathakali (Kerala), Manipuri (Manipur), etc. Dance has been around here for thousands of years Only in the first millennium, it saw some refinement and codification in India. The Bible and Talmud made references to dance and different terms related to it,
Presently there exist an astonishing variety of dances and their diversity among different cultures world over is just mind-boggling. How did humans develop the ability to dance is a subject of debate and discussion among the scientists world over. When you watched the Indian classical dance like Bharathanatym or western classical ballet dance did you ever ponder how we got this unique ability and which animals gave us this trait?
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| two chimps in the US zoo moving in sync.dailymail.co |
According to the researchers - Psychologists from the University of Warwick, Durham University and Free University of Brussels the ability to dance might have come from the chimpanzees. How did they arrive at the conclusion? Surprisingly, they saw two chimpanzees performing a ''duo dance-like behavior similar to a conga-line''.
They also admitted that they had never seen this kind of behavior with good coordination as one would find in a social ritual. One Dr Adriano Lameira and his team did the research and they reported their finding in the Journal Scientific Reports (dated 12 December 2019). They were quite surprised that the the two female chimps exhibited good level of 'motoric co-ordination, synchrony and rhythm' matching the levels of orchestra players doing the same musical piece. In this case for the first time the stimulus hadn't been triggered by nonhuman partners or signals. Normally, other species would move into rhythmic phase or tempo by an external stimulus and solo individuals. This recorded new behavior of chimps probably represents a stereotypy in captivity and shows some kind of link between humans and apes in the evolution of dance, an integral part of socio-cultural life of the humans.
Dr Adriano Lameira is of the opinion that ''the evolution of dance in the human clade remains obscure''. He further stated, ''Dance requires individuals to interactively synchronize their whole-body tempo to their partner's, with near-perfect precision, this explains why no dance forms were present amongst nonhuman primates''....''this is evidence for conjoined full-body rhythmic entrainment in great apes that could help reconstruct possible proto-stages of human dance is still lacking."
Two captive chimpanzees displayed - synchronized bipedalism suggestive of endogenously generated ritualized dance-like behavior. When you happen to do a tango remember those two chimps in the US zoo.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/670543
Adriano R. Lameira, Tuomas Eerola, Andrea Ravignani. Coupled whole-body rhythmic entrainment between two chimpanzees. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-55360-
