Study Shows Humans and Apes Have Common Body Language

VIVA – Recently, a discovery has indicated that the ancestor people have common body language with great apes. Scholars from St. Andrews University discovered the fact that humans understand many gestures that wild chimps and bonobos are using to communicate.

This research was published in the peer-reviewed academic journal PLOS Biology. The study was conducted where the scientists demonstrated to volunteers a video of primate gestures and then test subjects had to choose the correct meaning of this gesture. They were able to correctly discern roughly 50% of the apes’ gesticulations.

"So, we already had a suspicion that this was a shared gesturing ability that might have been present in our last shared ancestor. We're quite confident now that our ancestors would have started off gesturing, and that this was co-opted into (our) language," Scientists said.

For example, tearing strips from a leaf with teeth is an ape’s way of flirting, while a mouth stroke is asking for food. Apes use the body language “Lexicon” which consists of more than 80 gestures. 

Humans generally don’t use ape body language, though as it was already said, they’re able to understand them.

Scientists stated that it is unclear whether we inherited the ability to recognize these gestures genetically, or whether non-verbal communication of people is not that different from that of the other primates, allowing us to discern the meaning of the gesture even without knowing the context.

The ability of apes to communicate with gestures is not something entirely new. The Gorilla Koko mastered more than 1,000 signs from the language of deafmutes and learned to understand more than 2,000 words. The Gorilla Koko is also reportedly able to communicate thoughts and emotions.