By Bruce Bower
View a video of a macaque monkey interacting w/ its young by making faces.
Rhesus macaque mothers and their babies like to get in each others’ faces, exchanging looks and smacking their lips. They’re neither rude nor hungry. Just as their human counterparts do, these monkeys communicate in a mutually pleasing way that prepares infants to navigate the social world, a new study suggests.
Interactions between macaque moms and babies often begin with exaggerated lip smacking by the adult, who gently touches her infant’s lips and face with her mouth, ethologist Pier Ferrari of the University of Parma in Italy, and his colleagues report online October 8 in Current Biology. Mothers also lower their heads and then move them up and down while looking at babies seated nearby, as a prelude to lip smacking and mutual eye contact.