ArticlePLoS biology2023
Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures.
Article in PLoS biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring the Guessing-Game Experimental Paradigm: Inferences From Closed- Versus Open-Ended Semantic Space.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- The gestural repertoire of Bwindi mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei): gesture form and frequency of use.Animal cognition · 2025Article
- The origin of great ape gestural forms.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Processing Language Partly Shares Neural Genetic Basis with Processing Tools and Body Parts.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Qualitative Behavioural Assessment of bonobo emotional expressivity across observer groups and zoo housing environments.Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2024Article
- Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Frontal mechanisms underlying primate calls recognition by humans.Cerebral cortex communications · 2023Article
- Do Great Apes Use Iconic Gestures?Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive scienceReview
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the comparative study of human and nonhuman communication, ape gesturing provided the first demonstrations of flexible, intentional communication outside human language. Rich repertoires of these gestures have been described in all ape species, bar one: us. Given that the majority of great ape gestural signals are shared, and their form appears biologically inherited, this creates a conundrum: Where did the ape gestures go in human communication? Here, we test human recognition and understanding of 10 of the most frequently used ape gestures. We crowdsourced data from 5,656 participants through an online game, which required them to select the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures in 20 videos. We show that humans may retain an understanding of ape gestural communication (either directly inherited or part of more general cognition), across gesture types and gesture meanings, with information on communicative context providing only a marginal improvement in success. By assessing comprehension, rather than production, we accessed part of the great ape gestural repertoire for the first time in adult humans. Cognitive access to an ancestral system of gesture appears to have been retained after our divergence from other apes, drawing deep evolutionary continuity between their communication and our own.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.