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Do apes like to tease each other? It’s a question man has asked man since he stopped being ape and started being man. Finally, there’s a reason to go ape, though, because that question has been given an answer: yes. An international team of multidisciplinary researchers examined over 75 hours of footage of all the apes from the San Diego and Leipzig zoos and found that, yes, apes tease each other all the time. 142 times, in fact, categorized into 18 distinct varieties of teasing. Poking, prodding, offering things then pulling them away, pulling at hairs, tickling, stealing and generally being annoying were just some of the varieties of teasing shown by young apes in the 3-5 age bracket, plus older apes not in the 3-5 age bracket. ‘We cannot really say why they are doing it, but we can observe that they are doing it,’ said Dr Isabelle Laumer at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, one of the studies’ authors. ‘Playful teasing and its cognitive prerequisites may have been present in our last common ancestor, at least 13 million years ago.’ So there you go, your little brother really is that annoying – he’s had millions of years of practice before he was even born.
