Our ancestors did NOT grunt or grunt! People began to communicate with each other using hand gestures, not sounds, study says
- The researchers asked volunteers to describe the words using only mooing or gestures.
- They found that gestures were much more effective in conveying meaning.
- The gestures were also often similar across cultures.
Movies and television programs have long portrayed cavemen as using grunts to communicate with each other.
But a new study suggests that our ancient ancestors likely didn’t use sounds to communicate, but instead opted for hand gestures.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia asked volunteers to try to describe words using only grunts or gestures.
They found that gestures are much more effective at conveying meaning and are often similar across cultures.
“The universality of gestures means that they are ideally suited for initial human communication between modern humans and therefore support the hypothesis that gestures are the main modality for language creation,” the researchers said in their study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. .
Movies and television programs have long portrayed cavemen as using grunts to communicate with each other. But a new study suggests that our ancient ancestors probably didn’t use sounds to communicate, but instead opted for hand gestures (stock image image).
Hand gestures can make your words more memorable.
Looking for a way to express yourself? Then look no further than your hands.
Gestures such as cutting air or waving a hand can make what we say more memorable, scientists say.
This may explain politicians’ annoying habit of making jerky movements to emphasize words in their speeches, and why people in some countries, such as Italy, tend to gesticulate when they speak.
Read more here
In the study, the team decided to find out what is more effective for communication in different cultures – grunts or gestures.
“People of all cultures gesticulate when they speak, the blind gesticulate, and hearing adults and children can successfully use gestures as the only means of communication at the request of the experimenters,” the researchers say.
“Furthermore, complex manual languages with the same range of expressiveness as spoken language are rapidly emerging in populations of deaf children—and even among individual deaf children living in hearing families—or in communities with high levels of deafness.
“The ubiquity of gestures and their ability to rapidly evolve into language has led to the suggestion that language arose from hand gestures rather than voice calls.”
The researchers conducted two experiments to test this idea.
In the first experiment, they hired 30 people from Australia and 30 people from Vanuatu to play a game similar to charades.
In one round of the game, one person made a word using gestures, while the rest tried to guess what it was.
But in the second round, the person was asked to use grunts and grunts to convey the word.
The results of the game showed that gestures were much more effective in conveying meaning and were often similar between participants from Australia and Vanuatu.
In the second experiment, the researchers repeated the first experiment, but with visually impaired people who were instructed to convey words with gestures or grunts.
They found that gestures were again much more effective than grunts and grunts, even though people with visual impairments did not share common visual cues.
The results of the game showed that gestures were much more effective in conveying meaning and were often similar between participants from Australia and Vanuatu.
Overall, the results show that, according to the researchers, gestures are far superior to grunts as a means of communication.
“These results support the gesture-based theory of the origin of language,” the researchers concluded.
“As predicted by the embodied description of human cognition (as well as by philosophers and early explorers), gestural cues were more universal than vocal cues.
“This was true across cultures and even for participants with severe visual impairments (despite the lack of a shared visual experience).”
THE MAN’S FIRST TALK WAS ABOUT DO IT YOURSELF, STUDYING CLAIMS
In 2015, researchers claimed that cavemen originally started communicating between 2.5 million and 1.8 million years ago – and they were talking about DIY.
An international study has shown that stone tool making drove the evolution of language in our human ancestors on the African savannah.
This suggests that communication between our earliest ancestors may have been more complex than previously thought, and that tool making contributed to evolution.
The researchers, who included scientists from the University of Liverpool and St. Andrews, came to their conclusions by conducting a series of experiments to teach students the art of “old stoneworking”.
This is when cutting “flakes” are created by striking hard rock against certain volcanic or vitreous rocks such as basalt or flint.
Oldowan stonework dates back to the Lower Paleolithic period in East Africa and remained largely unchanged for 700,000 years until the more sophisticated Acheulean hand axes and cleavers were developed.
Testing five different ways to communicate Olduvian stoneworking skills to more than 180 college students, the researchers found that demonstration using verbal communication—versus imitation, non-verbal presentations, or gestures—produced the greatest volume and quality of flakes.
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