Humans use the same sign language as other primates and can understand many of the gestures that chimpanzees and bonobos use to communicate with each other.
This is the conclusion of a study during which volunteers interpreted primate gestures based on video material.
The study was conducted by researchers from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
The results indicate that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees used similar signs and that some of them are the "starting point" of the origin of human language.
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The findings were published in a scientific magazine PLOS Biology.
"We know that all large primates, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, have 95 percent common symbols in communication.
"We already suspected that these signs were also used by our direct common ancestors, and now we firmly believe that our ancestors started using symbols, and they were later incorporated into language," says Dr Kirsty Graham, lead researcher from the University of St Andrews.
The research is part of the scientists' ongoing mission to understand the origins of language by carefully studying the communication of our closest primate relatives.
This research team has spent years observing chimpanzees in the wild.
They previously discovered that great primates use an entire "lexicon" of more than 80 signs, each of which conveys a specific message to another member of the group.
A message like "scratch me" is sent with long movements that symbolize scratching, opening the mouth means "give me that food", and tearing leaves with the teeth is a sign of flirting.
Translating primate languages
Scientists have conducted experiments in which they watch and replay recordings, and this model has traditionally been used to test language comprehension in non-primate species.
In this research, the reverse approach was used - the ability of man to understand the gestures of his closest relatives among primates was tested.
Volunteers watched videos of chimpanzees and bonobos communicating, and then chose one of the offered translations, which they thought was the most accurate.
Participants correctly interpreted the signs of these animals more than half of the time, which is better than predicted.
"We are really surprised by the results," said Kirsty Graham.
"It turns out that we can understand almost instinctively, which is both fascinating from the point of view of the evolution of communication and really depressing for me as a scientist, who spent years in training to be able to do this," the researcher added.
"Signs that humans can naturally understand could be an "evolutionary and ancient common vocabulary of signs, used by all primate species, including us," according to Graham.
Check out another story that shows the similarities between humans and chimpanzees:
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