Humans capable of understanding signs and gestures used by apes: Study

A study has concluded that humans are capable of understanding the signs and gestures used by wild chimps and bonobos to communicate with each other. The study was carried out by researchers at St Andrews University and the results were published in the scientific journal PLOS Biology.

As part of the study, volunteers were shown videos of ape gestures and asked to translate them. Based on the results of the study, researchers concluded that the last common ancestor humans shared with chimps used similar gestures. These signs acted as a "starting point" for our language.

The path of video playback experiments was used since the method has traditionally been used to test language comprehension in non-human primates.

Lead researcher of the study, Dr Kirsty Graham, explained, "We know that all the great apes, chimps and bonobos,have an overlap of about 95 per cent of the gestures they use to communicate."

"So we already had a suspicion that this was a shared gesturing ability that might have been present in our last shared ancestor. But we're quite confident now that our ancestors would have started off gesturing, and that this was co-opted into language."

The study was part of a mission to understand the origin of language by studying the communication methods in our closest ape cousins.

The researchers had been observing wild chimpanzees for many years and noticed that the great apes used more than 80 gestures to communicate with another member of their group.

Participants of the study were shown videos of the apes and then asked to choose from a multiple choice list of translations.

They performed much better than expected, correctly interpreting the gestures over 50 per cent of the time.

"We were really surprised by the results," Dr Catherine Hobaiter from St Andrews University said. "It turns out we can all do it almost instinctively, which is both fascinating from an evolution of communication perspective and really quite annoying as a scientist who spent years training how to do it," she said.

(With inputs from agencies)

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