A team of St. Andres scientists, for the first time ever, have decoded the meanings of chimpanzee gestures.
Research was carried out by St Andrews primatologists Dr. Catherine Hobaiter and Professor Richard Byrne in the rainforest of Uganda.
Their study, published in the journal Current Biology, involved observing over 80 wild chimps and creating a dictionary of meanings behind a number of gestures by chimpanzees, like arm raises, foot stomps, and ground slaps.
Though it has been well known for a while now that chimps use gestures to communicate, until now no one has figured out what they are trying to say.
"There is abundant evidence that chimpanzees and other apes gesture with purpose," said Byrne, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews in the U.K., in a statement, according to a release issued by the university. "Apes target their gestures to particular individuals, choosing appropriate gestures according to whether the other is looking or not; they stop gesturing when they get the result they want; and otherwise they keep going, trying out alternative gestures or other tactics altogether."
The scientists used the Budongo Forest in Uganda to study the chimps.
During their research, they recorded the communicative interactions among chimpanzees and extracted over 4,500 instances of gesturing, according to the release. They focused on gestures when the chimps were not in a "playful" mood because while playing the gestures may not be used to express their actual meanings.
They were able to identify 19 specific meanings of 66 gestures.
For example: when one chimp taps another it means "Stop that." A hand slapping an object means, "Move away," and an arm raise means "Give me that," or "I want that," according to the study.
"Just as with human words, some gestures have several senses, but importantly the meanings of chimpanzee gestures are the same irrespective of who uses them," said Hobaiter, also a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews and the lead author of the study, according to the release. "Chimpanzees may use more than one gesture for the same purpose, especially in social negotiations, where the final outcome may be a matter of some give and take."
The researchers will next focus on determining whether the chimps use any variations while making these gestures to express subtle changes in the meaning, according to the release.
The paper was published on July 3. Click here to read it.
"Now that the basic chimpanzee gesture 'dictionary' is known, we can start to tackle other interesting questions," Hobaiter said. "Do some gestures have very general meanings, where their intended sense is understood from the context? Or do subtle variations in how a gesture is made determine which sense was meant?"
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