Abstract
Great apes give gestures deliberately and voluntarily, in order to influence particular target audiences, whose direction of attention they take into account when choosing which type of gesture to use. These facts make the study of ape gesture directly relevant to understanding the evolutionary precursors of human language; here we present an assessment of ape gesture from that perspective, focusing on the work of the “St Andrews Group” of researchers. Intended meanings of ape gestures are relatively few and simple. As with human words, ape gestures often have several distinct meanings, which are effectively disambiguated by behavioural context. Compared to the signalling of most other animals, great ape gestural repertoires are large. Because of this, and the relatively small number of intended meanings they achieve, ape gestures are redundant, with extensive overlaps in meaning. The great majority of gestures are innate, in the sense that the species’ biological inheritance includes the potential to develop each gestural form and use it for a specific range of purposes. Moreover, the phylogenetic origin of many gestures is relatively old, since gestures are extensively shared between different genera in the great ape family. Acquisition of an adult repertoire is a process of first exploring the innate species potential for many gestures and then gradual restriction to a final (active) repertoire that is much smaller. No evidence of syntactic structure has yet been detected.
Highlights
Great apes give gestures deliberately and voluntarily, in order to influence particular target audiences, whose direction of attention they take into account when choosing which type of gesture to use
These facts make the study of ape gesture directly relevant to understanding the evolutionary precursors of human language; here we present an assessment of ape gesture from that perspective, focusing on the work of the ‘‘St Andrews Group’’ of researchers
Ape gestures often have several distinct meanings, which are effectively disambiguated by behavioural context
Summary
The first hypothesis for gesture ontogeny to be investigated was that of learning from conspecifics, as in language (Tomasello et al 1994). The form of the gesture may physically resemble the movement pattern that the gesturer intends the target to make: e.g. the armswing under of a gorilla follows the path of the intended movement towards mating by the partner (Tanner and Byrne 1996), and the beckoning gesture of a bonobo, like the equivalent human gesture, follows the desired movement vector of the target (Genty and Zuberbuhler 2015) Are these gestures correctly interpreted by the apes because they understand the mimetic aspect of the movements (Russon and Andrews 2011)—realizing that they depict desired motion—or do they know what they mean? The apes remain aware of the meaning of the gestures and would recognize them if the gestures were used by others, even though they no longer use them themselves
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