The work fills a hole in the case for a shared linguistic lineage. “Maybe this is something that was shared with our last common ancestor and that we, in fact, retain, this ability to understand and use the great ape gestures,” Graham says. The finding suggests that humans still have some grasp of this ancestral vocabulary. “Humans without any training and without seeing any of the outcomes or surrounding behaviors can understand what chimpanzee and bonobo gestures mean,” Graham says. In the study, when thousands of people watched online videos of wild apes raising an arm, scratching and striking various poses, they got the gist of the animals’ lingo far more often than would be expected by chance. They show that our species can make a pretty good guess of the meanings of chimp and bonobo gestures, another hint that language may have evolved from an elaborate system of hand and body signals. In a paper published today in PLOS Biology, Graham and Hobaiter provide startling evidence that this ancestral ability may persist in modern humans. “They are using gestures in a way that is more languagelike, and so there’s this theory that human language might have evolved from this gestural basis,” Graham says.
The gestures of both species, which are humans’ two closest relatives, are more complex and varied than their vocalizations, which mainly reflect urgent needs such as finding food or spotting predators.īy contrast, the apes’ gestures serve as a deliberate way of conveying specific everyday goals, leading some scientists to believe that these signals are the precursors to human language. Andrews colleague Catherine Hobaiter built a similar body-language dictionary by observing the East African chimpanzees at the Budongo Central Forest Reserve in Uganda. And when it cups its hand under another’s chin, it is asking for food. This work has confirmed, for example, that when one of the animals repeatedly swipes the black fuzz on its chest, it is begging to be groomed. Andrews in Scotland has spent hundreds of hours among this screeching, scratching endangered troupe to decode its members’ nonverbal interactions. Primatologist Kirsty Graham of the University of St. Like other great apes, these animals have a rich social life, communicating with their fellows using some 80 types of gestures. The surge in activity caused GameStop’s market value to soar from $2 billion to upwards of $24 billion in a matter of days, temporarily toppling Wall Street at what Wall Street does best.In the forest near Wamba, a village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some of the last remaining bonobos breed, feed and lounge in the trees. While these hedge funds shorted the gaming franchise, they were blissfully unaware of the coming counterattack as individual investors connected by nothing but the Reddit chatroom WallStreetBets took stock options in the other direction. The amateurs-turned-wealthy-investors shone an embarrassing light on the shorting behavior of hedge funds, before taking their money and delivering it to the doors of those working to protect endangered animals.Īfter triggering a 1,700 percent surge on stocks in GameStop - an American gaming retailer - millions of small-time investors in the company saw some big-time returns as they turned the tables on two hedge funds that had bet GameStop’s stock would fail. In what must surely constitute the Robin Hood story of Reddit, investors who beat Wall Street at its own game earlier this year are now investing their earnings in wildlife conservation.
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