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.
“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.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - A bonobo holds her baby at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on April 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi, File)
FILE - A chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) snuggles against his mother in the zoo in Leipzig, central Germany, Aug. 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File)
FILE - Two chimps walk together at Chimp Haven in Keithville, La., Feb. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
TURIN, Italy--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 26, 2026--
Roboverse Reply, the Reply Group company specializing in robotics and automation, won the 1 st Place in the “Reconnaissance” category and a special prize for “Best Team Effort” at the European Land Robot Trial (ELROB) 2026 in Thun, Switzerland. Teaming up with ELP, a specialist for technical equipment for defusing service, the company demonstrated outstanding performance alongside a field of international participants from June 15 to 19, proving that its autonomous solutions operate reliably under real-world conditions.
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ELROB is Europe’s most demanding and established showcase for robotics and unmanned systems, where leading experts from around the world compete with their latest developments. Teams tackle challenges such as reconnaissance, explosive ordnance detection – meaning the search for booby traps and unexploded ordnance – as well as rescue operations. In modern security context, the integration of autonomous unmanned systems for operations in high-risk environments is gaining relevance.
Building on its success at ELROB 2024, the technological foundation of the solution was once again the proven Roboverse Reply platform, which has been consistently refined to deliver a major leap forward at this year’s competition. While at the last ELROB two years ago the focus was on a primarily remote-controlled solution, the current system uses features based on embodied AI to assist the operator during the mission. The system enables semi-autonomous reconnaissance in unknown environments, automatically detecting and reporting mines, ammunition, booby traps, and drones. Whenever human intervention is required, a VR-based telemanipulation solution provides intuitive remote control.
Filippo Rizzante, CTO of Reply, comments: “ELROB 2026 impressively demonstrates how our robotics solutions are increasingly evolving from pure teleoperation to intelligent assistance systems for critical missions. We are bringing greater autonomy, improved environmental awareness, and robust communication architectures to systems that must function reliably under real-world conditions. This allows us to support emergency responders in critical scenarios with even greater precision and safety.”
Roboverse Reply
Roboverse Reply supports companies in implementing challenging automation projects. As specialists in robotics, 3D technologies and agentic AI, we provide our customers with comprehensive support – from strategy to productive operation. We automate inspection, material flow and routine tasks and orchestrate heterogeneous robot fleets to ensure smooth overall operation. Digital twins create transparency, allow for pre-simulated what-if scenarios and form the basis for AI-supported process optimisation. In this way, we minimise investment risks, increase operational agility and help our partners to scale robotics in a sustainable and future-proof manner. www.reply.com/roboverse-reply/en
Roboverse Reply won 1st Place in the “Reconnaissance” category and a special prize for “Best Team Effort” at the European Land Robot Trial 2026, proving that its autonomous solutions operate reliably under real-world conditions.
