Experts decode chimp gestures

JARED Diamond, in his 1991 book The Third Chimpanzee, compared chimp biology with our own. Sharing 98.4% of their DNA with humans, chimps are more closely related to us than they are to the other great apes.

We are so similar to them genetically that, Diamond suggested, they belong with us in the genus Homo. Recent research has shown that the differences are greater than was previously thought but the chimps remain our closest animal relatives. Now, scientists from St Andrew’s University in Scotland claim that our hairy cousins use gestures of such complexity that they constitute a form of language. In the 1960s, philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky declared that language is a uniquely human creation, a view which has prevailed ever since. Was he wrong? Catherine Hobaiter and Richard Byrne, writing in the journal Current Biology, think he was.

Chimps not only use tools, they are able to construct them. Have they also created their own language? When chimps interpret the calls and gestures of their peers, are they engaging in conceptual dialogue? Birds sing and display to attract mates and defend territories. These behaviours trigger responses from potential partners and rivals but they don’t necessarily have meaningful content. When you throw a switch to turn on a light, you are not communicating with the local power station. Similarly, a singing bird is just trying to trigger a response. Speaking to the BBC, Hobaiter gave this analogy; ‘..you pick up a hot cup of coffee. You scream and blow on your fingers. I can understand from that that the coffee was hot, but you didn’t necessarily intend to communicate that to me’.