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Humans may have more in common with parrots than chimpanzees due to a shared natural ability to dance, a new study suggests.
A groundbreaking set of observations has shown a pet cockatoo showing off a diverse array of moves while listening to two well-known hits from the 1980s.
Named Snowball, the 12-year-old sulphur-crested bird is shown spontaneously performing a repertoire of 14 moves including the “down-shake”, “body roll” and “downward/head-foot sync”, in time to Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
The parrot, who had not been trained or encouraged to dance, also managed 10 separate moves - including “Vogue”, a side-to-side heat tilt synchronised with a foot-lift - while accompanying Another One Bites the Dust.
The footage is fascinating the scientific community because the ability to dance with that degree of flexibility has not previously been recorded elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
This includes in primates such as chimpanzees, the animals genetically closest to humans, which are thought to possess no dancing ability whatsoever.
The research team at Harvard, Tufts and San Diego universities, also believe the fact that Snowball danced so enthusiastically seemingly for its own sake - there was no prospect of a reward - shows creative trait shared with humans but rarely observed elsewhere.
“What’s most interesting to us is the sheer diversity of his movements to music,” said senior author Professor Aniruddh Patel.
Writing in Current Biology, the researchers said: “Snowball does not dance for food or in order to mate; instead, his dancing appears to be a social behaviour used to interact with human caregivers.”
They argue that humans and parrots' shared ability to communicate verbally and to mimic movements may lie at the heart of the common tendency to dance.
An ability to form long-term social bonds and to learn complex sequences of actions may also explain the link.
It suggests that dancing to music isn't an arbitrary product of human culture but a response to music that arises when certain cognitive and neural capacities come together in animal brains.
The new study comes 11 years after a paper analyzed separate footage of Snowball tapping his food and bobbing his head in time to the Backstreet Boys’ song Everybody.
Soon after that study, the parrot’s owner, Irena Schulz, noticed her pet was displaying new moves and began recording them.
The videos have since been analyzed by Dr Joanne Jao Keehn, a psychologist at San Diego State University and a classically and contemporary-trained dancer.
Unlike the way humans normally dance, Snowball tended to dance in snippets of about three or four seconds, dancing differently each time he heard a new tune.
Schulz was in the room shouting an occasional "Good boy", but Snowball was the only one in the room dancing.
Head bobbing is part of parrot courtship displays, while and foot lifting is part of the species' normal locomotion.
The scientists therefore believe the cockatoo's dancing may be as a result of these innate movements, which are controlled by central pattern generators in the brain, becoming in some way triggered by the eighties hits.