homo floresiensis

Viktor Deak is a paleoartist hell-bent on perfection. So obsessed with man's prehistoric past is Deak, a stocky Hungarian-American, that he and his wife were married in the Gorilla Ghetto at New York's Bronx Zoo. He still spends much of his spare time staring at our nearest cousins in zoos, studying their reactions to the world with uncommon allure. But Deak's work straddles the ancient and the bleeding edge of digital art. He may still construct Neanderthals, Homo ergasters and Homo habilises from skulls using clay, but today his work is more likely to be seen on a screen than a sculpture gallery.

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.