Periodic Reporting for period 4 - GESTURALORIGINS (Gestural Origins: Linguistic Features of pan-African Ape Communication)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-05-31
Language may be the most powerful social tool any species has evolved, we use it for physics and poetry, for gossip and jokes. Understanding the origins of language speaks to the fundamental question of what it means to be human. But what, if anything, makes human language unique? What did we need to communicate that took us beyond the systems of signals seen used by other species around us today? Many other species’ communication also contains rich exchange of nuanced information; but humans do more than broadcast information, we use it to share ideas and intentions that come into our minds with the minds of those around us. It revolutionised our understanding of non-human communication when we discovered that great apes’ use their gestures to convey meaningful information in a similar language-like way: ape gesture is essential to understanding what language is, and how human language evolved. Beyond meaning, two core features of human language are social learning and syntactic structure. These are universals, present across cultures. We all learn words and how to use them from others, leading to languages and dialects. We all use syntax; expressing different meanings by recombining words. In fact, these two particular features are common in animal communication: sperm whales learn songs from others; finches re-order notes into different songs. But, in a significant evolutionary puzzle, both appear absent in the communication of our closest great ape relatives.
The discovery of meanings in ape gesture resulted from studying ape communication under the challenging natural environments that allowed for chimpanzees to fully express their system of communication. A single study of a single group: it was the tip of the iceberg. Employing pan-African data across 25 ape and 8 human groups the Gestural Origins project tackles three major objectives.
(1) Is there cultural variation in ape gesture? We recognise that to understand human behaviour, we must study people across diverse cultures and environments. Within the 8 subspecies of African great ape there are hundreds of groups with unique cultures, inhabiting habitats as diverse as rainforest and savannah. To investigate whether or not features of human language exist in the communication of non-human great apes we must compare ape communities, including humans, within and across populations on a new, pan-African scale. We will look at how their biological inheritance, their physical environment, and their social interactions affect how apes acquire and use gestures.
(2) When apes combine signals, does it change their meaning? Moving beyond sequential structure we will look at how apes combine signals to construct meaning, and how the speed, size, and timing of gestures impacts meaning. We will use our rare access to multi-generational ape datasets.
(3) Human-ape gesture. Ape gesture research to date, has neglected the one ape that may be crucial to addressing these questions: us. With two new approaches, we will turn the tables on comparative research using ape field-methods (focal follows, playback experiments) to investigate human behaviour. We will investigate adults’ and children’s use and understanding of gestures to compare them directly to other apes.
The discovery of meanings in ape gesture resulted from studying ape communication under the challenging natural environments that allowed for chimpanzees to fully express their system of communication. A single study of a single group: it was the tip of the iceberg. Employing pan-African data across 25 ape and 8 human groups the Gestural Origins project tackles three major objectives.
(1) Is there cultural variation in ape gesture? We recognise that to understand human behaviour, we must study people across diverse cultures and environments. Within the 8 subspecies of African great ape there are hundreds of groups with unique cultures, inhabiting habitats as diverse as rainforest and savannah. To investigate whether or not features of human language exist in the communication of non-human great apes we must compare ape communities, including humans, within and across populations on a new, pan-African scale. We will look at how their biological inheritance, their physical environment, and their social interactions affect how apes acquire and use gestures.
(2) When apes combine signals, does it change their meaning? Moving beyond sequential structure we will look at how apes combine signals to construct meaning, and how the speed, size, and timing of gestures impacts meaning. We will use our rare access to multi-generational ape datasets.
(3) Human-ape gesture. Ape gesture research to date, has neglected the one ape that may be crucial to addressing these questions: us. With two new approaches, we will turn the tables on comparative research using ape field-methods (focal follows, playback experiments) to investigate human behaviour. We will investigate adults’ and children’s use and understanding of gestures to compare them directly to other apes.
The Gestural Origins project and team have consistently broken new ground in developing open-access methods and frameworks for the study of ape communication, and in the scale and scope of data collection on gesture. We have built a collaborative network across 22 research sites, conducted expeditions to remote field locations, and presented our work to audiences around the world (from small scale workshops in Oslo, Tanzania, and Uganda, to documentaries that reached millions).
1. We have established a dataset of wild ape gesture an order of magnitude larger than anything that has existed for our field; already over 20,000 gesture cases, across 8 (sub)species of apes, from over 500 signallers in 33 social groups, it continues to grow.
2. We have developed new data collection protocols and in-video coding methods that allow us to collect data across species living in a wide range of environments in a similar way. Our principle is not to dictate that gesture and other forms of communication be coded in a specific way, but allow sufficient flexibility that users can adapt the scheme to their own needs while still allowing for direct comparison across projects and questions. We have built and published a robust new open-access framework (GesturalOrigins), already being applied across new species, including capuchins and elephants.
3. Over 20,000 people have taken part in our online studies, hosted on www.GreatApeDictionary.com which also serves to make our research findings accessible to the public and to other researchers. For example, anyone can request access to collaborate with our video archives. To make these data-arks more accessible we published a first searchable Open Data database for ~14,000 videos of chimpanzee behaviour. Our original Great Ape Dictionary experiment is now an online learning game, widely used as a science communication tool in classrooms around the world. We have a YouTube channel that hosts video examples of our ape gestures, used by other researchers as well as by science educators.
4. Like many others, we have access to large video data archives from which we extract data on animal behaviour as it occurs in natural habitats. Automated coding of animal behaviour makes locating and analysing data much faster and more reliable. However, until recently, machine learning tools were only able to track behaviour in ‘clean’ predictable environments. In 2022 we published DeepWild, an open-access tool using DeepLabCut to track ape movements in wild handheld footage of great ape and we are core-collaborators in OWL a zero-shot species detection model. We hope that these tools will help transform research for ourselves and others.
1. We have established a dataset of wild ape gesture an order of magnitude larger than anything that has existed for our field; already over 20,000 gesture cases, across 8 (sub)species of apes, from over 500 signallers in 33 social groups, it continues to grow.
2. We have developed new data collection protocols and in-video coding methods that allow us to collect data across species living in a wide range of environments in a similar way. Our principle is not to dictate that gesture and other forms of communication be coded in a specific way, but allow sufficient flexibility that users can adapt the scheme to their own needs while still allowing for direct comparison across projects and questions. We have built and published a robust new open-access framework (GesturalOrigins), already being applied across new species, including capuchins and elephants.
3. Over 20,000 people have taken part in our online studies, hosted on www.GreatApeDictionary.com which also serves to make our research findings accessible to the public and to other researchers. For example, anyone can request access to collaborate with our video archives. To make these data-arks more accessible we published a first searchable Open Data database for ~14,000 videos of chimpanzee behaviour. Our original Great Ape Dictionary experiment is now an online learning game, widely used as a science communication tool in classrooms around the world. We have a YouTube channel that hosts video examples of our ape gestures, used by other researchers as well as by science educators.
4. Like many others, we have access to large video data archives from which we extract data on animal behaviour as it occurs in natural habitats. Automated coding of animal behaviour makes locating and analysing data much faster and more reliable. However, until recently, machine learning tools were only able to track behaviour in ‘clean’ predictable environments. In 2022 we published DeepWild, an open-access tool using DeepLabCut to track ape movements in wild handheld footage of great ape and we are core-collaborators in OWL a zero-shot species detection model. We hope that these tools will help transform research for ourselves and others.
We could not describe human language by only collecting data in St Andrews, Addis Ababa, or Shanghai, we need to understand the full range of ways in which it is expressed across cultures to see the human universals. Just like humans, the communities of other ape species can be small or large, egalitarian or despotic, cohesive or dispersed, live in wide open savannah or in dense rainforest. Each one has its own unique social and physical environment, and other apes also have their own unique cultures. We need to be able to put all of these diverse pieces of the puzzle together to be able to see the road map along which human language evolved.
Gestural Origins gives us that road map, not only can we explore the similarities and differences between human language and ape gesture, but by building a rich detailed picture we can make new predictions about the communication of groups as yet unstudied - a robust way in which to test hypotheses about language evolution. We have established a dataset of wild ape gesture that is already an order of magnitude larger than anything that has existed for our field, doing so has not simply been an exercise in refining existing understanding through more detailed data, the fundamental objectives we want to address can only start to be explored with data at this scale. These fully accessible video-archives will allow us to address current barriers to research on wild ape behaviour, and an invaluable data-ark for species in urgent conservation crisis.
Gestural Origins gives us that road map, not only can we explore the similarities and differences between human language and ape gesture, but by building a rich detailed picture we can make new predictions about the communication of groups as yet unstudied - a robust way in which to test hypotheses about language evolution. We have established a dataset of wild ape gesture that is already an order of magnitude larger than anything that has existed for our field, doing so has not simply been an exercise in refining existing understanding through more detailed data, the fundamental objectives we want to address can only start to be explored with data at this scale. These fully accessible video-archives will allow us to address current barriers to research on wild ape behaviour, and an invaluable data-ark for species in urgent conservation crisis.