Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning

http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2004825

by pvaldes • 8 years ago

77 30 8 years ago

journals.plos.org

sunstone• 8 years ago

It's quite possible that human language started as body/gesture language and then migrated to primarily voice.

IMO it's still primarily a body/gesture language. Oh, sure, it has some abstract symbolic representation stuff built on top of more primal human communication channels. However, when the new stuff conflicts with body language and paralinguistic signals, it typically gets disregarded.

mratzloff• 8 years ago

He said on a global network where communication is primarily text-based.

brazzy4• 8 years ago

IMO it's still primarily a body/gesture language.

Nonsense.

The vast majority of what we communicate nowadays cannot be represented adequately or at all by your "more primal human communication channels".

ramblerman• 8 years ago

Oh, sure, it has some abstract symbolic representation stuff built on top

Some??? You mean concepts like Money, God, the State, Law, debt, marriage, responsibility :)

drb91• 8 years ago

So what is crying then?

You’re being hugely reductive for no discernable benefit.

simiones2• 8 years ago

It's also very possible that human language started as a purely internal thinking mechanism, and only later became adopted for communicating with other humans.

This seems very counter-intuitive initially, but makes more sense when you think about how much of your use of language is addressed to other people, and how much is used simply for thinking to yourself.

yosito• 8 years ago

I'm multi-lingual and very few of my thoughts are in any "language" unless I'm intending to communicate them with others. When I only spoke English, I don't think my thoughts were in English either, but it was harder to be aware of that fact until I could ask myself which language I was thinking in. The same is true of my dreams. I don't dream in any particular language, other than an occasional word here or there.

dreyfiz• 8 years ago

The idea that bonobos and chimpanzees can speak the same language is absolutely thrilling. Even though bonobos are chimps, I always saw the two species as very distinct; this discovery really resets my worldview on multiple levels.

jerrre• 8 years ago

I'm not an expert by far, but aren't many animal "gestures" shared by multiple species: lying down to surrender, standing on hind legs to threaten, showing teeth, etc...?

wallace_f• 8 years ago

Also not an expert, but I suppose at some point there can be a distinction made between body language and sign language?

firmgently• 8 years ago

bonobos aren't chimps, they're separate species

https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/08/18/the-difference-between-...

"an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus Pan; the other is Pan troglodytes, or the common chimpanzee."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo

dghf2• 8 years ago

The sentence you quote from Wikipedia starts like this:

The bonobo (/bə.ˈnoʊ.boʊ/ or /ˈbɒ.nə.boʊ/; Pan paniscus), formerly called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often, the dwarf or gracile chimpanzee

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee:

The taxonomical genus Pan (often referred to as chimpanzees or chimps) consists of two extant species: the common chimpanzee and the bonobo.

It's like "crow", which can refer to a particular species (e.g., in England a crow, unqualified, usually means a carrion crow), or to the genus Corvus, which includes e.g. ravens and rooks.

fallingfrog• 8 years ago

Kind of funny how much of their vocabulary consists of various ways of saying "get over here, you sexy beast.."

pvaldes• 8 years ago

Even more interesting, If staying bipedal means 'lets make sex' for bonobos, I wonder if human observers could change the behaviour of studied bonobos increasing the sexual encounters (just because we are standing there shouting 'lets make sex' with our bodies all the time). Wouldn't be crazy if we repeat the research with robots and remote cameras to find that they are not so promiscuous as we thought?

We must be a particularly foul-mouthed species for them. And we share also the 'stop what you were doing' grab/slap.

Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning

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