If you tickle a young chimp, gorilla or orang-utan, it will hoot, holler and pant in a way that would strongly remind you of human laughter. The sounds are very different - chimp laughter, for example, is breathier than ours, faster and bereft of vowel sounds

But in context, the resemblance to human laughter is uncanny

Marina Davila Ross of the University of Portsmouth has used these noises to explore the evolutionary origins of our own laughter

tickled youngsters of all of the great apes

to build an acoustic family tree, showing the relationships between the calls

listen to MP3s of a tickled chimp, gorilla, bonobo and orang-utan

The tree linked the great apes in exactly the way you would expect based on genes and bodies

even though human laughter sounds uniquely different, it shares a common origin with the vocals of great apes