Laughter may date back 15 million years, shared by humans and great apes

Humans and great apes have been giggling in similar ways since branching off the evolutionary tree, a new study suggests. The science-journalism coverage adds useful context, while the strongest evidential footing still comes from the underlying data, papers or institutional documentation.

That matters because biology becomes more informative when an observed effect begins to look like a mechanism rather than an isolated pattern. The gap between identifying a correlation in biological data and understanding the causal chain that produces it is routinely underestimated, and the history of biomedical research is populated with associations that collapsed when the mechanism was sought and not found. A result that comes with a proposed mechanism, even a partial one, is more useful than a purely descriptive finding because it generates testable predictions that can narrow the hypothesis space. This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File Humans and great apes have been giggling in similar ways since branching off the evolutionary tree, a new study suggests.

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.

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. We are like the masters of laughter, I would say," said De Gregorio, whose findings were published 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. Chiara De Gregorio, Rhythm and timing in laughter reveal that human vocal plasticity falls on a hominid continuum, Communications Biology (2026).

The broader interest lies in whether the reported effect points toward a real mechanism and not merely a reproducible but unexplained association. Biology has learned from decades of biomarker failures that correlation, even robust correlation, is not a substitute for mechanistic understanding. A pathway that can be traced from molecular interaction to cellular response to organismal phenotype provides a far stronger foundation for intervention than a statistical association discovered in a large dataset, however well the statistics are done.

Www. nature. com/articles/s42003-026-10499-z Master's in physics with research experience. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success.

Because this item comes through Phys. org Biology as science journalism, it should be treated as contextual reporting rather than primary evidence. Good science reporting can identify why a result matters, connect it to the wider literature and make technical work readable, but the decisive evidence remains in the original paper, dataset, mission release or technical record. That distinction is especially important when a story is later repeated by aggregators, because repetition increases visibility, not evidential strength.

The next step is to test whether the effect repeats across different methods, cell types, model organisms and experimental conditions. Reproducibility is the first test, but mechanistic dissection is the second, and a result that passes both has a substantially better chance of translating into something clinically or biotechnologically useful. The path from a laboratory finding to an applied outcome typically takes a decade or more, and most findings do not complete it; the current result sits at the beginning of that process.

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