Chimps and bonobos use same gestures as humans to communicate

Chimps use gestures to convey messages like 'play with me' to other members of their group

We use many gestures to communicate with each other without needing words, but we're not the only ones.

Experts have discovered that many of the gestures wild chimps and bonobos use to communicate with one another are very similar to those used by humans.

This discovery suggest that the last common ancestor humans shared with chimps used similar gestures, and that these may have been a "starting point" for our language today.

The study was part of an ongoing scientific mission to understand where our language comes from by carefully studying communication in our closest ape cousin.

How was the research carried out?

This team of researchers has spent many years observing wild chimpanzees.

They previously discovered that the great apes use more than 80 gestures, each conveying a message to another member of their group.

For example messages like "groom me" are communicated with a long scratching motion; a mouth stroke means "give me that food" and tearing strips from a leaf with teeth is something chimps do to show off.

Scientists used video-playback experiments - which is often used to test how much primates understand about human communication.

But in this study, researchers at St Andrews University tried to work out how much humans could understand the gestures of primates.

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Volunteers watched videos of the chimps and bonobos gesturing, then selected from a multiple choice list of possible meanings.

The participants performed significantly better than expected by chance, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures over 50% of the time.

Lead researcher, Dr Kirsty Graham from St Andrews University explained that even before the experiment was carried out the team already had a suspicion that there was shared gesturing abilities that were common in both in the human's and monkeys last ancestor.

But they weren't sure on the level or amount of understanding there would be between the two.

She added: "We're quite confident now that our ancestors would have started off gesturing, and that this was co-opted into language."

Dr Catherine Hobaiter from St Andrews University said she was "really surprised by the results".

She said: "It turns out we can all [interpret gestures] almost instinctively, which is both fascinating from an evolution of communication perspective and really quite annoying as a scientist who spent years training how to do it."