How Advanced Understanding of Gestures in Apes Shapes Early Human Developments in Language

By developing complex languages, homininans have been able to achieve a better understanding of their surroundings, develop more complex group behaviours and share information helping expand upon adapting to new environments using new necessary skills.

A bigger brain and its many connections are what helped the hominina branch gain distance on its ape counterparts. It did also create a chasm when it comes to language.

Three theories to explain gesture languages in great apes

Indeed, recent developments in research on language in apes have exploited different theories to explain how apes possess the ability to use gestures in order to communicate.

• The earlier theories suggest the gestures are the results of ritualisation, meaning apes would understand that making a specific gesture at a specific time would yield the desired result: a gesture to get food while the other is eating them carries the meaning "give".
• Another theory showed the possibility of a knee-jerk reaction (due to being hard coded into genes) that is shared among individuals and associated to language.

In both cases, there is no communication between the two individuals, meaning that there is no understanding for the ape making the gesture of what the other thinks and what their reaction will be.

Researchers have argued in a recent research paper that apes will borrow gestures from other apes so much so that the same gesture might be represented throughout different populations of apes. Alongside with the fact that some may move in order to better be seen making the gesture, the idea of apes thinking about better being understood is a just an inch closer.

Could the gesture be an early demonstration of primitive language?

One that is carefully crafted through natural selection and still necessitating a huge step forward in order to make it a complex communication tool between two individuals or a community.

Apes are able to share these gestures because they articulate the same body, they would not be able to conceptualise them otherwise. That is the reason why they cannot understand a gesture that is not directly linked to a result and a clear boundary set between using language to express direct meaning and a more abstract language; something only humans are able to use and perceive.

When early humans developed their language, they were able to go beyond a direct end goal and understand the gesture's abstract meaning according to the situation and environment it is displayed in and the individual(s) it related to.

We as humans are taught language, but we do possess a primitive expression in the form of cries as a baby, a plethora of different tones to signify different ailments and needs. However consciousness of these cries' reach stops as soon as they are met.

Human-like behaviours shared by apes

The stories of Lucy and a bonobo being taught how to behave like humans shows us apes are capable of using language to express themselves on a direct matter. Researchers accompanying them would even go as far as studying what they called complex behaviours following developed trains of thought. However, it is known that self projection onto research matters is strong, from earlier Western philosophers looking at American tribes as a window to the beginning of their civilisation to research on our animal ancestry nowadays possibly influenced by our human nature. Trying to identify what shared traits we possess to understand where some defining human features come from, it seems we are more likely to press our human nature onto our closest relatives than identifying what makes them 'them' and what might have been connected to our direct hominina ancestry that was first able to develop a language.

All of this to say that are last common ancestor is so far remote that traces of our primitive, yet complex language, might have happened further down 'our' line.