Dr Kirsty Graham the lead researcher from St Andrews University said that early humans developed their ability to gesture from apes.
The study was part of an ongoing scientific attempt to understand the origin of human language by studying communication in our closest ape cousins.
They discovered that great apes use a whole “lexicon” of more than 80 gestures each giving a message to another member of their group.
A mouth stroke means “give me that food” while tearing strips from a leaf with teeth is a chimpanzee gesture of flirtation.
Scientists used video playback experiments, as traditionally this approach has been used to test language comprehension in non-human primates.
However during the study they changed the approach to assess humans’ abilities to understand the gestures of apes.
After watching the videos of the apes volunteers were asked to choose from a multiple choice list of translations.
Participants performed better than expected, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures 50 percent of the time.

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