Filming chimpanzee gestures:

Filming chimpanzee gestures.

The Sonso community of chimpanzees has its own reality television show. However, the show isn’t on any cable network; it’s for the benefit of science. By capturing the chimps’ daily lives and interaction on camera, researchers hope to understand how their gestures evolved and find clues to the origins of human language. Catherine Hobaiter, a field primatologist from St. Andrews University, Scot...

The Meanings of Chimpanzee Gestures

Chimpanzees' use of gesture was described in the first detailed field study [1, 2], and natural use of specific gestures has been analyzed [3-5]. However, it was systematic work with captive groups that revealed compelling evidence that chimpanzees use gestures to communicate in a flexible, goal-oriented, and intentional fashion [6-8], replicated across all great ape species in captivity [9-17]...

The Meanings of Chimpanzee Gestures 1

Ape Gestures: Interpreting Chimpanzee and Bonobo Minds

Improving methods for studying primate interaction are providing new insights into the relationship between gesture and meaning in chimpanzee and bonobo communication.

Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning

Cross-species comparison of great ape gesturing has so far been limited to the physical form of gestures in the repertoire, without questioning whether gestures share the same meanings. Researchers have recently catalogued the meanings of chimpanzee gestures, but little is known about the gesture meanings of our other closest living relative, the bonobo. The bonobo gestural repertoire overlaps ...