Baby apes' arm waving hints at origins of language

Actions speak louder than words. Baby chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – our four closest living relatives – quickly learn to use visual gestures to get their message across, providing the latest evidence that hand waving may have been a vital first step in the development of human language.

After a long search for the origins of language in animal vocalisations, some evolutionary biologists have begun to change tack. The emerging "gesture theory" of language evolution has it that our ancestors' linguistic abilities may have begun with their hands rather than their vocal cords.

Katja Liebal and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have found new evidence for the theory by studying how communication develops in our closest living relatives. They discovered that all four great apes – chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – develop a complex repertoire of gestures during the first 20 months of life...

Journal references: American Journal of Primatology, DOI: 10.1002/ajp.21011