![]() However, more and more research has started to unveil language’s deep phylogenetic roots: from the way other species combine signals to change the meaning (we use “meaning” in this article to refer to signal functions and Apparently Satisfactory Outcomes ) of an utterance to their use of social inference in communication to how behavioural and social contexts seem to disambiguate signal meanings. Regarded by philosophers and scientists alike as the cognitive capacity most critical to human uniqueness, the apparent discontinuity between human language and nonhuman communication has been argued to present an evolutionary puzzle. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This work was supported by Gorilla Awards in Behavioural Science who provided the Gorilla.sc licensing fee and an unlimited participant award to KG ( ). The experiment was presented in Gorilla.sc ( a full preview and all importable sheets are available through Gorilla Open Materials ( ) and video data files are available at the Great Ape Dictionary on Youtube ( ).įunding: This research received funding from the European Union’s 8th Framework 287 Programme, Horizon 2020, under grant agreement no 802719 to CH ( ). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data and code are available in an open access repository at. Received: JAccepted: NovemPublished: January 24, 2023Ĭopyright: © 2023 Graham, Hobaiter. PLoS Biol 21(1):Īcademic Editor: Frans B. Cognitive access to an ancestral system of gesture appears to have been retained after our divergence from other apes, drawing deep evolutionary continuity between their communication and our own.Ĭitation: Graham KE, Hobaiter C (2023) Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures. By assessing comprehension, rather than production, we accessed part of the great ape gestural repertoire for the first time in adult humans. We show that humans may retain an understanding of ape gestural communication (either directly inherited or part of more general cognition), across gesture types and gesture meanings, with information on communicative context providing only a marginal improvement in success. We crowdsourced data from 5,656 participants through an online game, which required them to select the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures in 20 videos. Given that the majority of great ape gestural signals are shared, and their form appears biologically inherited, this creates a conundrum: Where did the ape gestures go in human communication? Here, we test human recognition and understanding of 10 of the most frequently used ape gestures. Rich repertoires of these gestures have been described in all ape species, bar one: us. In the comparative study of human and nonhuman communication, ape gesturing provided the first demonstrations of flexible, intentional communication outside human language.
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