HUMANS can recognise and understand gestures made by chimpanzees and bonobos, according to a study by the University of St Andrews.
Although we no longer use them ourselves, people correctly identified more than half of the gestures made by the primates in an online study of 5500 participants run by Dr Kirsty Graham and Dr Catherine Hobaiter from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience.
Dr Graham said: “All great apes use gestures, but humans are so gestural – using gestures while we speak and sign, learning new gestures, pantomiming etc – that it’s really hard to pick out shared great ape gestures just by observing people.”
