Humans retain ‘ancestral’ understanding of ape gestures, study says | Hacker News Reader

Humans retain ‘ancestral’ understanding of ape gestures, study says

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97 pointsisaacfrond80 comments

Ok, I saw this in the new wires the other day and wondered when it would come up.

They know: humans can agree on what primate gestures mean, most of the time. They don't actually know: what the primates believe the gestures mean. And: even if there is agreement, why does that say anything about our language being evolved from a common ancestor gesture language? I mean, ok that might be true, but why is this evidence for that.

Let me present my own survey data: I have deer in my yard sometimes. They know that once in a while I will throw out a couple of deadfall apples. So they ask for apples by standing, looking at me through the kitchen window for 10 minutes. Does this mean that English evolved from Deer-speak? No. The fact they're standing staring at me for a long time implies they're asking for something. Food is the only thing that fits the context. I suppose if I gave them food and they carried on staring, then I might assume they want a back rub...

Also make them

- a place (pond?) to drink

- and an automatized cow brush.

I think what is missing is are we then able to use these gestures to successfully communicate back with the primates?

What is the chimpanzee gesture for “please, sir, don’t tear my limbs off”?

Because otherwise “get away from me” or “clean me” or “get on my back” is not going to go over well.

There was a lot of research into communicating with animals using sign language. I think it never went further than identifying objects, simple tasks and needs. Of course a lot of the research done back then was outright fraud, which might have interfered with alternative approaches. After all, why study alternative ways to communicate with animals when you can use sign language to discuss climate change with a gorilla.

If we assume (for the sake of a reductive argument) they want either food, or water, then feeding them apples can't resolve which it was, because apples are moist and in Deer-efficiency terms may be "meh: I was thirsty this does"

So from a "what action/noun" pair perspective its give <something> and it's not clear what <something> is without a more consistent experiment to make it clear its a choice A or B.

But what it can go to is "give" is in this. <stare at human> is pretty strongly bound to 'give me something' -Right up until you realise they want to headbutt you or are staring at their own reflection in the glass or really are just zoned out.. or a million other potential interpretations.

The thing here is that Animals are probably doing min/max on the cost/reward outcome and could stare for an hour, for a remarkably diffuse win. If its safe, warm, sheltered and MIGHT have one of food, water or a back rub, it might be a win set against the energy cost of foraging.

I guess this explains why humans scroll reddit mindlessly for hours :-)

Because they hope to find food, warmth and a backrub there eventually?

The best I got out of reddit is a occasionally laugh.

Food, warmth or a backrub can be summarised as "comfort". I think a good laugh falls under that category as well.

> If we assume (for the sake of a reductive argument) they want either food, or water, then feeding them apples can't resolve which it was [...]

see Quine on radical interpretation and the indeterminacy of translation: https://iep.utm.edu/indeterm/

I think it's pretty accepted that people did not evolve from chimpanzees, but rather, people and chimpanzees evolved from some common ancestor

Pretty sure I said that above.

Yeah, same.

I find it easier and less effort to communicate with hand gestures where possible (especially with non-native speakers) because it reduces cognitive load. I'm wondering if the focus areas of processing are also located in older part of the brain.

Temple Grandin has a newer book titled Visual Thinking. She tells of two groups taught to sharpen flints (IIRC). The first group had instruction only by gestures and example; the second group also had written or spoken instruction. Apparently persons in the first group developed skill faster. Overall she suggests that words can distract from visual observation or attention.

IIRC Derrick Jensen refers to an experiment in which apes caught on to cheating behavior faster than humans, presumably because they were not fooled by any spoken claims.

Have you noticed how chimp’s for example how was seem to have this random look? They never seem to look at anything for long, but somehow they still see everything.

> Does this mean that English evolved from Deer-speak? No. The fact they're standing staring at me for a long time implies they're asking for something.

This is in itself something that's common to mammalian (and possibly even wider animal) behaviour, and something that humans and deer likely inherited from our common ancestors. It would be entirely possible in an alternate universe for this behaviour to have entirely different meaning.

Agreed. Everybody gets this wrong. On Nova I saw a frivolous study that showed babies 'imitating' parents as young as a few weeks.

The evidence? A parent face to face with a baby would repeat the babies' random expression. Occasionally the baby would make an expression again. Voila - imitation!

Or randomness I guess. Hard to know without actually measuring something and doing statistics. But stories like this are fun and make a good news bite, so we'll continue to see them pop up.

I was pretty excited about this result until actually going through the quiz.

They give you so many hints, I don't think you can draw conclusions from this.

For example:

- In multiple videos an ape is eating, and another ape is trying to grab food out of their mouth. The options presented are like: "Give me that food" or "Move to a new position". Obviously the food is relevant.

- In multiple videos a larger ape presents its back to the other, while the smaller moves towards hopping on or grooming it. Clearly this is the "climb on my back" or "groom me" options.

In addition to providing a highlighted illustration, multiple choice, and slow-mo replays, it really just seems like this quiz was (intentional or not) designed to show an obvious positive result. Looking forward to better research on this.

Every time I bend down, my 5 year old tries to jump on my back - is this all small children or just my own ?

Your 5 year old likely learned it directly from the apes.

Ask chatgpt how to reduce ape influence in the house.

From the article: “‘when we told participants a bit about what the apes were doing before, it did improve their understanding significantly but only by about 5 percent,’ she noted. ‘So it seems like the gestures themselves are really meaningful to people.’”

Humans could identify the meaning of gestures “more than 50% of the time”. That’s really not a high bar to reach, especially as you’d expect most gestures to involve the parts of the body, or mimic the action the gesture is about.

Furthermore plenty of animals have display or signalling behaviours, and we can often figure out what those mean. Ancestral memory of some kind really seems a stretch.

If we could identify even non obvious gestures maybe 90+% of the time, that might require a better explanation than just figuring it out, but if it was that high I suspect the article would have said so.

In the space of interpretation, there's a huge number of possibilities. 50% might be a huge outlier.

Actually only 4 possibilities in the provided quiz - it's multiple choice.

Did you read the study, or just assume all multiple choice questions have four options? I couldn’t tell the number of choices from the article.

The study says "four possible meaning answers", but more importantly the article links to the quiz used in the study itself: https://research.sc/participant/login/dynamic/505CF355-CEF5-...

I bet pet owners can guess pet gestures as well.

On the other hand human gestures don’t always translate from one culture to another; what does that mean?

It means that our range of linguistic expression is several orders of magnitude greater and more complex than that of apes. Still when we don’t share a spoken language we fall back on gestures.

Lots of dog owners are bad at reading their dog's body language.

For example, if your dog licks their lips, they're usually trying to calm down the situation (e.g. telling you to stop annoying them), but lots of people don't know this.

There are other calming signals, such as the dog closing and opening their eyes (slower than blinking). You can use this on your dog and they might understand it :)

Lots of dog owners are bad at it, but they can probably hit the right thing 50% of the time. Without any sort of successful communication, I can't imagine it would be pleasant to own a pet.

Pets adapt to humans, as well, so it's not a clean comparison. In my experience with cats, for example, the ones who were regularly "spoken" to (by responding to their meeps) tend to develop a richer gamut of vocalizations which they use to be more specific about what they want. But it's not really "cat language" - it's language that cats develop specifically for humans.

The big problem with the conclusion about an ancestral link is the researchers weren't studying our ancestors, they were looking at contemporary modern apes. Apes whose progenitors evolved side-by-side with humans. How can we be sure the apes haven't adapted their behavior based on their interactions with humans?

Moreover, this type of reasoning reinforces the debunked model of speciation that claims apes are "less evolved" than humans. Modern apes have experienced the exact same amount of evolution as we have. It's only a difference in which ecological niche we each happened to specialize in.

> Moreover, this type of reasoning reinforces the debunked model of speciation that claims apes are "less evolved" than humans.

They are less evolved in terms of acoustic language.

But then we’re “less evolved” in terms of grip strength, force generation and any number of areas where other apes beat us.

There’s no such thing as “more evolved” or “less evolved,” which is the parent’s point.

Sure but the article talks about communication. If it was talking about grip strength humans might be portrayed like less evolved.

>If it was talking about grip strength humans might be portrayed like less evolved.

There is, in no sense, any way to talk about less/more evolved. Except for age of lineage, which is the same for all life on earth.

Why would it depend solely on the duration? Some species stabilize and don't change much over millions of years (like crocodiles), others change rapidly in a comparatively short period of time (like humans).

Are you suggesting we should measure how 'evolved' a species is by the mutation rate in their lineage, or by 'successful' adaption through mutation?

I'm not sure but I think the above poster was making the point that saying 'more' or 'less' evolved implies the possibility of a generalised qualitative measuring of mutations.

He didn't even mention mutations or measurements, so you might be reading a bit too much into it there. But yeah, I guess one (or a whole army of scientists) could think up a measurement scheme like that, starting from the last common ancestor. Meanwhile, I propose we continue using words like "evolved" in an informal way since they might turn out to have more meat to them than initially apparent.

No he’s pretty much right. I wasn’t talking about mutations specifically but there’s no objective “more” or “less” when it comes to evolution. Just “different.”

Why not though? To me it sounds dogmatic to make such pronouncements without any evidence. Just because nobody has come up with a formula for something doesn't make it unreal. Phenomena exist outside of our small rationally circumscribed model of the world. Homo sapiens has adapted to a incredible variety of environments, we've pushed ourselves way outside our comfort zone and accumulated and enormous amount of changes in a short period of time. It makes sense that we've accumulated more "genetic experience" this way, that we've grown further than other species. This is how most people use the word "evolved", seems fair enough to me.

> Why not though? To me it sounds dogmatic to make such pronouncements without any evidence.

The onus is in you to prove one path is objectively “more evolved” than another. All other animals have undergone the same amount of time evolving as humans.

What evidence do you present that we accumulated more genetic changes than any other organisms? Did you catalogue and count the changes?

Nope, the onus is on you to provide evidence if you're going to go against common sense. And all you have is that flimsy "it's the same time stretch" argument. Do you also protest when people call someone immature for their age: "that's impossible, age is the only objectively measurable factor in this equation"? That's not a very convincing argument, even if some people are convinced. Maybe they just feel threatened by the idea.

I didn’t talk about time, I pointed out your measure isn’t evidence because you never actually measured it. Unless you can back up your statement, you’re the one falling back to a subjective measure (public opinion, that you also never proved) to make an objective statement of “fact.”

All you have is a completely unrelated analogy that misrepresents what I said. What does maturity and age have to do with this discussion?

Considering any extant species to be "less evolved" displays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution doesn't move towards a greater goal. All extant species - whether flatworms or humans - are equally evolved.

I'm definitely less evolved towards the underground movement than mole rat.

See what I did here? I chose the specific goal for evolution and evaluated how far evolution brought two species towards this goal.

>I chose

You certainly can choose any arbitrary goal of "evaluating" evolution, but any conclusions you come to are meaningless, because the premise that you can evaluate evolution this way is based on the fundamental misunderstanding of evolution that it works towards a greater goal. This is not true. Hence, any conclusion you make is not true...

"I'm definitely less evolved towards the underground movement than mole rat."

is not meaningless. When I say it you know exactly what I mean.

> misunderstanding of evolution that it works towards a greater goal

I never said there's any greater intrinsic goal of evolution (except fitting specific niche). I said you may specify goals for the evolution and evaluate how far it got towards reaching that goal.

For example, we are not sufficiently evolved towards covid immunity however we are somewhat evolved towards black plague immunity when compared to people who lived in times before black plague.

Nothing about this article indicates that anyone thinks apes are “less evolved” than humans. Finding similarities between branches of the evolutionary tree is a common way to build knowledge about shared ancestors. We do the same within our species as well.

But if you want to be precise, I wouldn’t say our evolutionary pressures are the “exact same” at this point. There are indications that human evolution has accelerated as a consequence of our spread and technology, while other apes have remained relatively undisturbed in their EEAs up until the last few centuries.

https://www.science.org/content/article/human-evolution-spee...

This is a bit "circular". Presumably the researchers have determined what these gestures mean, and now they're asking other humans to see if they can get the same meanings that these researcher-humans determined. We don't know for sure what the apes think.

So we've shown that the way a group of human researchers interpret ape gestures is the same way many other humans from a self-selected subset interpret ape gestures.

They're also not accounting for cross-species training in the first place. The number of apes that have seen and emulated humans, then passed emulation to their children is not zero.

Your objection reminded me of when I was a senior in college, and for independent study credit I helped a couple of postdocs with a psychology paper they were writing. They were concerned with researcher bias in category selection in surveys. Good for them! But their solution was to offer much more free form surveys and then have us, the researchers, spend many, many hours examining the individual surveys and picking categories to make up to fit the responses. I completely failed to see how this fixed anything as it was still us, the researchers, choosing the categories, and they failed to seem to want to comprehend that there might be a problem with their approach.

The other undergrad who was also working with us approached me and thought we should ask for our names on the paper. I told him I didn't want my name associated in any way, but that he should shoot for the moon.

I've seen people do a study like that the right way. It works by having separate researchers invent categories independently and then compare them once they have classified everything. No talking about the project is allowed until everybody is done.

Looking at the quiz, I am skeptical. At least for me, guessing the gestures was more about seeing the apes and how they were interacting and guessing what would happen next, more so than any intrinsic understanding of the meanings of the gestures.

I didn't feel very confident in recognizing many of them either. Sometimes the context helped though (was there food in the scene?), or the reaction to the gesture.

Link to the study quiz (that includes videos of the gestures): https://research.sc/task/7918868

Link does not work for me. Says Experimet not available.

I took the quiz and concluded that the videos are sometimes hard to tell what the goal is. The multi choice options and the illustration next to it, lead me to believe that the survey results are super biased.

Without any controls (e.g. more distant apes such as orangutans, or even other expressive animals such as elephants), this study is completely meaningless.

Alternative theory: "humans are pretty smart and good at understanding animals." There's a fair amount of supporting evidence for that theory. I can understand a dog's gestures pretty well too. Does this mean I have some kind of Dune style genetic memory of when my ancestors first tamed wolves?

But what does it mean, biologically, to be “pretty smart and good at understanding animals”, and from where does this ability arise?

Isn't that obvious? From understanding and communicating with each other

It seems like a pretty basic component of anything resembling intelligence. Even relatively simple animals tend to be be able to demonstrate some form of communication with each other. This animal is showing its teeth to me, the teeth it would use to attack me, posturing itself in an aggressive way, and making some noise. Ah I guess that noise doesn't mean let's be friends.

So I think your question is where the intelligence came from, and outside of hand-wavy appeals to evolution, I think the simple answer is that nobody knows.

Remains to be seen, although it's noteworthy that when around cats, dogs, horses, or cows; humans will pick up on their body language very easily, even though we have relatively distant common ancestors.

I also find myself intuitively in the camp of your alternative theory.

Nevertheless I have an off the cuff comment to your question: Dune genetic memory is outside the bounds of our most basic understanding of inheritance because we do not know of any obvious mechanism to encode those memories into gamets in "one shot" (from direct experience to immediate offspring). Compare this with a very long arc over which a gazelle is born with brain initialized so carefully that it can learn to walk instantly, effectively having something that really looks like "genetic memory" of how to walk.

My confused ramblings aside, this to me suggests that it is at least plausible that such commonality among apes and homo exists. Now, providing evidence for it is quite a different ball game ...

We know that "genetic memory" is a thing because there are experiments demonstrating it. For example, human (and, more generally, primate) babies seem to have hardwired ability to recognize snake-like shapes as threatening.

It doesn't work like Dune, of course. It's just the consequence of evolution applying to the brain just as much as it does to everything else, producing brain structures that are dedicated to a particular task that happened to be important for the species at some point. If pattern-matching snakes is such a task, I don't see why pattern-matching primate gestures couldn't be one, as well.

I’m a firm believer that there exists communication archetypes that span across species and millennia, so archetypal that they may be universal.

What is the difference between a gesture and behavior? Lots of animals can read the behavior of some other species.

Animals have a universal language for gestures that of course we understand.

If I was hanging out at the barn and a clown came up the driveway with a large bunch of balloons, one of the horses would try to catch my eye and want to see how I reacted when I looked at the clown and they would tend to respond to the clown as either "normal" or a threat depending on how I respond.

In a herd, to first order, horses are going to look to the oldest and most experienced horse in the group on the assumption that they've seen a number of threats and survived and have the best judgement. Some of how we can ride and drive horses is because we can slot into the top of their social hierarchy in certain respects.

Animals size you up as an animal based on various characteristics. On foot you would have a very hard time catching deer bedded down but you can get close to them very easily on a horse because animals usually parse "horse + human" as just a "horse" and because horse has eyes mounted on the side of its face they see it as a herbivore compared to you, with your eyes in the front, looking like a carnivore.

It is not just horses, communication with dogs and cats are based on the same principles, wild animals are just as capable of "pointing" something out to another animals. I know is true for mammals because I've had a lot of dealings with mammals but it is probably just as true for birds and many reptiles.

Politicians are mastery of their own cultural gestures.

Ground chief, instructs large machine operators.

Scuba divers, alerts others to surroundings.

American Indian use sign language as a bridge between disparate tribal language.

Gestano, an universal sign language for human today.

Koko, a gorilla who mastered Sign Language.

Sheepdog, also a master of distinguishing gesture vs. behavior.

Once basic gestures are mastered, one can tell the difference between gesture and behavior.

Heck, even body behavior is a form of a language in itself.

Association gets harder when going from physical realm into psychological; even harder when going into virtual abstraction.

(Disclaimer: my kid has a PhD in Communication Science)

Am I the only one who read the title as "app gestures" - oh so my kids have inherited my ability to pinch to zoom?

It seems many people are dismissing this as report as complete junk science. They read the article, decided the conclusions are far-fetched.

Imagine what 'scientists' can do for topics that aren't so easy to digest. If you question THAT science, why then you're just a conspiracy theorist.

No, that’s usually not how it works. People usually get called a conspiracy theorist for making claims not based on (scientific) evidence. Often conspiracy theorists are not experts in the field and cannot distinguish between good and bad arguments (even though some conspiracy theorists have a uni degree in the field).

Questioning a study does not a conspiracy theorist make, quality of of your arguments does.

Its not even proven science that we evolved from apes

We both evolved from a common ancestor - we wouldn’t share so much DNA otherwise.

What else might we have evolved from?

Parallel evolution? Incredibly unlikely, but possible. I'd like to think my great great grand daddy might be a mollusk with some wicked genetic mutations.

We didn't evolve from apes, we are apes. Apes is a group that encompasses animals including gorillas, bonobos, humans and other animals.

At least we are 'greater apes' not just apes

Yeah but so are gorillas.

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