Get a load of this: Humans and great apes share similar giggles
[June 26, 2026]
By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN
NEW YORK (AP) — Humans and great apes have been giggling in similar ways
since branching off the evolutionary tree, a new study suggests.
How do we know this? Researchers tickled 13 captive apes — including
gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos — and recorded the
results. The new research reexamined those decades-old recordings and
compared them with the newly captured giggles of four young children
while they were being tickled and playing at home.
It turns out that the chuckles of humans and great apes follow similar
rhythms, with regular timing between their laughs, a uniting thread that
likely reflects their ties to a common ancestor, researchers said.
“In a way, we are very similar to other great apes because we’ve been
laughing in a similar way for 15 million years,” said study author
Chiara De Gregorio, a primatologist at the University of Warwick in
England.
Laughter communicates a playful, happy feeling without using words. Many
animals can laugh too, but the giggles don’t follow human patterns as
closely. When researchers tickle rats, for example, they respond with
ultrasonic squeaks.
Scientists trying to uncover how laughter evolved have picked apart
animals’ facial expressions, but less work has been done on how laughs
sound. And compared with apes, human laughter has become faster and more
complex. For one, our laughs sound different based on context — from a
polite chuckle among colleagues to a full-bodied guffaw with close
friends.
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A chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) snuggles against his mother in
the zoo in Leipzig, central Germany, Aug. 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Jens
Meyer, File)
 “We are like the masters of
laughter, I would say,” said De Gregorio, whose findings were
published Thursday in the journal Communications Biology.
These giggles evolved to best suit animals’ different social lives,
said Brittany Florkiewicz, who studies animal communication at Lyon
College and had no role in the new research. She said the study’s
findings make sense, and point to a need for more investigation.
Florkiewicz said she’d like to hear comparable recordings of other
animals with playful facial expressions, like dogs, horses and cats.
That could tell us more about how laughter evolved, so we can
“understand what makes us uniquely human, but also what is similar
between humans and other animals.”
Studying the origins of laughter may seem corny, but it's one aspect
of human communication that can help us understand others —
including how we learned to speak. Because sounds don't fossilize,
scientists are using the evidence we do have to trace things back,
one chuckle at a time.
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