Last updated on May 7, 2023
Throughout childhood, many of us watched dozens of Disney movies, including the Disney Princess series, Tarzan, and The Jungle Book. If you haven’t already noticed, there’s a common characteristic within these movies: the characters all attract and understand animals to some extent. This is one of their magical superpowers. Though these movies are considered fiction, it turns out that there is no longer a secret language between these fictional characters and real animals if humans can actually understand apes.
Humans and apes come from a long way back. We are about 98 percent genetically similar to apes. However, one specific difference between our species is their individual language. The human language consists of spoken or sign language along with cultural gestures. No other ape species except humans have developed a spoken language. So, where did our human language originate from?
Dr. Kirsty Graham, in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, explains, “[The apes] are using gestures in a way that is more language-like, and so there’s this theory that human language might have evolved from this gestural basis.”
In order to test this theory, Dr. Graham and her colleague, Dr. Hobaiter, recently collected 5,656 responses to see if people could identify ape gestures from 20 videos in an online quiz. For example, people would watch a short video of a chimp gesturing to the other chimp to groom him by extending one arm and gliding his other arm across his forearm repeatedly. After watching the video, people would try to match the gesture’s meaning in a multiple-choice question.
Surprisingly, they found that humans can correctly interpret the gestures of chimps and bonobos. In fact, the average score of this quiz was above 50 percent (52.1%), a statistically high result regarding the study’s size. This result is significantly higher than 25 percent if people were to blindly guess. It’s fascinating how humans can recognize these gestures without even thinking much. Furthermore, a previous study found that “89 percent of the gestures used by 1- to 2-year-old infants were also used by chimpanzees of all ages,” explained Dr. Verena Kersken. This increasing amount of evidence supports the claim that human language reflects upon apes’ gestural language.
Although further research is needed to answer how and why humans understand these ape gestures, this recent finding has allowed us to understand our own human language cognition as well as human evolution in the long run. As one of the most complex human cognitive skills, language helps us develop human communication and interactions. Similar to how Disney characters already knew how to interpret the gestures of the animals they encounter, we as humans are just starting to realize that the human language may have evolved from the ape’s language of hand and body gestures. Maybe these Disney characters never had magic in the first place; we just didn’t recognize our “powers” in understanding the animal gestures.
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