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, the subjects were able to correctly understand more than half of the monkey’s gestures shown. “This suggests that these gestures may form part of an ancient evolutionary gestural vocabulary common to all great ape species, including us,” said Kirsty Graham, one of the authors.
Graham of the University of St Andrews in Scotland 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 must try to understand what the animals want to communicate with them. “Give me the food”, “Crawl me”, “Come closer” or “Don’t do that” were some of the answers that the subjects could choose.
About 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 authors, it is unclear whether the understanding of ape gestures is in the human genome or if humans and apes share the ability to understand communicative signals due to their intelligence and physical similarity. (apa/dpa)