Chimps Hold Handy Answer to Modern Language

Submitted by Sean Williams on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 17:26

Humans get their linguistic functions from the left side of the brain (the left cerebral hemisphere, to use the proper semantics - more to come). But why? How did we begin using this 'hemispheric lateralisation' (told you!); setting us on the road to modern language? A team of American experts claims chimpanzees, our nearest cousins, hold the key.

The group, from Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta, Georgia, recently completed a study of 70 chimpanzees over a ten-month time period (published in Elsevier's Cortex, Jan 2010), recording their communicative gestures both towards humans and each other. Specific movements included 'arm threat', 'extended arm' and 'hand-slap', fulfilling social roles like attention-seeking, excitement, threat, reconciliation, grooming, play or aggression.

The chimps showed a huge preference towards using their right hands to make these gestures. Supervisor Prof. William D. Hopkins of Agnes Scott College, Georgia says this new data proves chimps use the same parts of their brain as humans.

"The degree of predominance of the right hand for gestures is one of the most pronounced we have ever found in chimpanzees in comparison to other non-communicative manual actions."

"Speech evolved initially from a gestural communicative system in our ancestors."

"We already found such manual biases in this species for pointing gestures exclusively directed to humans," adds Prof. Hopkins. "These additional data clearly showed that right-handedness for gestures is not specifically associated to interactions with humans, but generalizes to intraspecific communication."

French writers Dr Adrien Meguerditchian and Prof. Jacques Vauclair, of Aix-Marseilles University, go one further in concluding our own linguistic skills evolved from hand gestures in apes and chimps. "This finding provides additional support to the idea that speech evolved initially from a gestural communicative system in our ancestors," they write. "Moreover, gestural communication in apes shares some key features with human language, such as intentionality, referential properties and flexibility of learning and use."

This year a number of high-profile breakthroughs have been unravelling the mysteries of man's beginnings.

June saw the discovery of 'Ardi', the 'earliest human', in Ethiopia - dating back 4.4million years. Anthropologists have even surmised that her contemporaries became bipedal to impress potential mates.

Further examinations of the Homo floresiensis or 'hobbit' remains on the Indonesian island of Flores suggests the tiny humanoid may have interacted with our own Homo sapiens forebears.

More recent research has revealed early humans and Neanderthals crossed the sexual divide and mated with each other, some 30,000 years ago.

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