Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning | Hacker News Reader

Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning

journals.plos.org

77 pointspvaldes30 comments

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.

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...?

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

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

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.

Or Jackdaws! (Here’s the thing....)

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

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.

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.

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

Yes, but when I read that I imagine your eyes rolling.

And infamous for its vitriol.

Well, yeah, I like the textual/narrative stuff too. It's a fun game. It's just a minority of my experience.

> 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".

I believe a single emoji — ponder or similar — is genuinely an appropriate response here, however they are automatically stripped. A policy I agree with, but they are surprisingly capable despite their simplicity and (in many cases) direct mapping onto body states.

Now try expressing the concepts of "automatically stripped", or "policy I agree with", or "surprisingly capable" in emoji or body language.

emoji don't help you express precise rational statements. they add something that text lacks: the subtext that people normally express with tone and body language. emoji aren't a replacement for your day to day unicode symbols, they are something you can add to make your messages more expressive.

technically you can express all of the same things without emoji, but there's a limit to how subtle you can be. by adding an emotional cue using an emoji i can completely change the meaning of a statement by adding contextual subtext.

That's a very different thing than the claim that human language is "still primarily a body/gesture language", which is what I was arguing against.

There are many interesting things which cannot be expressed by body language, one of which is what is meant by “primarily”.

Maslow's hierarchy? Body language is primary, it comes first.

By number of bits required to describe the typical change to synaptic weights? No idea.

By number of raw bits? If I had to bet, I’d give 10:1 that body language beats words with reasonable compression for both audio and video streams, much stronger certainty for uncompressed.

That is a great point. Also note though, that none of the Bonobo/Chimp gestures listed in OP are actually emotions! They are mostly commands or expressed desires. And all can be easily done by humans with gestures and no voice as well.

Do these animals express emotion with face and body? Do we know very little about that, or is that just outside the scope of this study?

Good luck procreating without it.

But it is overridden by more primal signals.

If I lower my chin (widening the face's aspect ratio), clench my fists and muscle in up close to you, and say "Nice to meet you" through gritted teeth, what message do you get?

> But it is overridden by more primal signals.

Please read again what I wrote and then consider how your reply completely misses my point.

> If I lower my chin (widening the face's aspect ratio), clench my fists and muscle in up close to you, and say "Nice to meet you" through gritted teeth, what message do you get?

The vast majority of vocal communication nowadays is not things like "Nice to meet you". Your contrived situation falls apart when you're saying instead "I would like to order a double Espresso and a slice of cheesecake".

I don't think you're noticing the vast majority of communication as communication. The inner voice that narrates your experiences is a tiny portion of the whole, and if you practice at it you can notice more of what goes on outside its grasp.

Like, uhh, take a look at a crowded sidewalk sometime. A ton of people there collectively figure out how to communicate their intended motion and collectively decide how to plan out how to go about in a way that doesn't have collisions. It's an incredible amount of complex negotiation, and it happens at a pace that is far too rapid for discussion to help out.

Or better yet, take a partnered dance class or twelve. You'll quickly develop a very acute sense of how people use their bodies and what kinesthetic ideas they have for the music.

> 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 :)

So what is crying then?

You’re being hugely reductive for no discernable benefit.

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.

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.

Interesting! Myself, I have a native language and I'm also fluent in English, and basically all of my thoughts are expressed conversationally (I also have conversations in most of my dreams, though of course they have many other components).

I'm curious - if you don't think in language, do you have any way of explaining how you think about abstract concepts?

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