Happy Nice Mall

Our distant primate relative, indian hindiis a critically endangered species of lemur only found in Madagascar. These black and white primates are the weight of a small dog and look like a cross between a cat and a koala. And they sound – depending on who you ask – like the scream of a balloon rushing through the air.

Andrea RavignaniA cognitive biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands disagrees with the balloon part.

“Every scientific discipline has its own concept of beauty, but I think their voiceovers are beautiful,” he said. “It’s also pretty complex.”

Dr. Ravignani and colleagues investigated this complexity and found that although the last common ancestor between humans and indris lived more than 77 million years ago, we are more alike than you might think, at least when it comes to singing. They published their findings Monday. Current Biology.

Singing and rhythm in other animals have intrigued scientists for decades, in part because they can give us insight into our own evolution.

“We can infer something about when and how we acquired certain key features of musicality, such as our ability to move in a rhythm or coordinate our pitch with others,” he said. Aniruddh PatelNot involved in the study, but whose research at Tufts University focuses on music cognition in humans and other genres cockatoo snowball. You may have seen Snowball boping to the beat “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys in a YouTube video in the late 2000s.

After Snowball, other organisms had signs of rhythm – lovebirds and one California sea lion named Ronan. But the rhythmic abilities of our close relatives remained more mysterious, especially since they were related to singing.

“Only a few primate species sing, so they are valuable resources in our investigation of the evolutionary origins of human musicality,” said Dr. patel.

Researchers from the University of Madagascar and Turin have recorded songs from 20 indri groups (39 animals in total) over 12 years and searched these songs for rhythmic features found in human music. In Lemur songs, they discovered two examples of human-like rhythms: a 1:1 rhythm, where the intervals between the two voices have the same duration, and a 1:2 rhythm, where the second interval is twice as long as the first. They also noticed a gradual decrease in tempo, a common feature in human music called “ritardando.”

These categorical rhythms were described for the first time in a non-human mammal. The findings suggest that lemurs have a sense of beat, a repetitive pulse that allows us – okay, some of us – to move in time with music.

Dr. “When you’re listening to a piece of music and dancing to it, you’re basically processing this very complex stream of audio, extracting some regularity from it, and then you guess what happens,” Ravignani said. “If an indri had a ‘tac, tac, tac’ metronome in his head, it would probably produce what we see. It’s very close to human music – pretty amazing.”

Whether this musical overlap between humans and indris is a common ancestry or a case of convergent evolution – our rhythmic abilities evolved independently – remains unclear. Researchers suspect it’s a combination of the two.

“It’s easy to suggest that rhythmic categories may have followed the same evolutionary trajectory in songbirds, indrias, and in songbirds like humans,” he said. Chiara De Gregorio’s photo., a researcher and co-author at the University of Turin. “But we cannot ignore that human music is not really new, that it has intrinsic musical characteristics that are more deeply rooted in primate ancestry than previously thought.”

Discovering what we have in common with indris helps unravel the mystery of the evolutionary origins of human music, but it also brings much-needed attention to these incredibly important lemurs. cultural significance To the people of Madagascar.