People also gesture, but that’s only part of their communication. A Scottish research team is therefore getting to the bottom of the question of whether adults can decode the gestural speech of monkeys. Her conclusion: It works surprisingly well.
Humans are better than expected at interpreting chimpanzee communicative gestures. This is what two Scottish researchers write in the journal “PLOS Biology”. As a result, subjects could correctly understand more than half of the monkey gestures shown. “This suggests that these gestures may be part of an ancient evolutionary common gestural vocabulary of all species of great apes, including us,” said Kirsty Graham of the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Graham and her colleague Catherine Hobaiter had more than 5,500 study participants watch short videos of the ten most common gestures made by common chimpanzees and bonobos. The subjects should try to understand what the animals want to communicate with them. “Give me the food”, “Crawl me”, “Get closer” or “Don’t do that” were some of the answers from which the subjects could choose.
Around 52 percent of the participants typed correctly – according to the researchers, significantly more often than random guessing would lead one to expect. The results were only slightly better when the subjects learned something about the context in which the gesture was made. According to the study, the answers of the study participants were only more than 50 percent in the error range for the “shake object” gesture. On the other hand, other gestures of the monkeys such as “showing genitals” were classified much better.
According to the authors, it is unclear whether the understanding of ape gestures lies in the human genome or whether humans and apes share the ability to understand communicative signals due to their intelligence and physical similarity. The study shows that people with a gift for languages ??no longer seem to produce monkey gestures themselves, but instead use gestures in addition to language. Therefore, the approach chosen for the investigation was not to examine the production of the gestures, but rather their understanding.
