Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Spatial Reference in a Bonobo Gesture

2014; Elsevier BV; Volume: 24; Issue: 14 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2014.05.065

1879-0445

Émilie Genty, Klaus Zuberbühler,

Action Observation and Synchronization

Great apes frequently produce gestures during social interactions to communicate in flexible, goal-directed ways [1Call J. Tomasello M. The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah2007Google Scholar, 2Genty E. Breuer T. Hobaiter C. Byrne R.W. Gestural communication of the gorilla (Gorilla gorilla): repertoire, intentionality and possible origins.Anim. Cogn. 2009; 12: 527-546Crossref PubMed Scopus (183) Google Scholar, 3Hobaiter C. Byrne R.W. The gestural repertoire of the wild chimpanzee.Anim. Cogn. 2011; 14: 745-767Crossref PubMed Scopus (214) Google Scholar], a feature with considerable relevance for the ongoing debate over the evolutionary origins of human language [1Call J. Tomasello M. The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah2007Google Scholar, 4Corballis M.C. The gestural origins of language.Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Cogn. Sci. 2010; 1: 2-7Crossref PubMed Scopus (22) Google Scholar]. But despite this shared feature with language, there has been a lack of evidence for semantic content in ape gestures. According to one authoritative view, ape gestures thus do not have any specific referential, iconic, or deictic content, a fundamental difference versus human gestures and spoken language [1Call J. Tomasello M. The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah2007Google Scholar, 5Zuberbühler K. Communication strategies.in: Mitani J. Call J. Kappeler P. Palombit R. Silk J. The Evolution of Primate Societies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago2012: 643-663Google Scholar] that suggests these features have a more recent origin in human evolution, perhaps caused by a fundamental transition from ape-like individual intentionality to human-like shared intentionality [6Tomasello M. Origins of Human Communication. MIT Press, Cambridge2008Crossref Google Scholar]. Here, we revisit this human uniqueness claim with a study of a previously undescribed human-like beckoning gesture in bonobos that has potentially both deictic and iconic character. We analyzed beckoning in two groups of bonobos, kept under near natural environmental and social conditions at the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary near Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, in terms of its linguistic content and underlying communicative intention.