An international team of researchers combed through decades of work on ape gesturing to look for hints on how language might have evolved in humans. They examined studies on chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutan from as early as the 1950s. What they found was that the dozens of gestures that apes demonstrate aren’t random.
They’re intentional
Apes use gestures to convey meaning or command to a specific individual. This is different from conveying knowledge or changing opinions, but it’s still deliberate.
There are dozens of gestures and most of them are shared amongst the great apes
Some of this similarity is due to their bodies; they’re similarly shaped so there would be gestures that are more frequent. But after analysing their data the researchers found that these similarities occurred more than one would expect just by chance.
They are the result of a common ancestor
But culture decides which gestures are more common in a population.
There’s a lot of redundancy
There are way more gestures than there are meanings, and some gestures mean different things in different contexts. But that isn’t much different from human languages.
The research is by no means conclusive, but it’s a good start. The parallels between ape gestures and human language are there, and there are still many more questions to ask.
Byrne, R. W., Cartmill, E., Genty, E., Graham, K. E., Hobaiter, C., Tanner, J. (2017). Great ape gestures: intentional communication with a rich set of innate signals. Animal Cognition, 20, 755 – 769. Doi:10.1007/s10071-017-1096-4
