Journal
ETHOLOGY ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION
Volume 34, Issue 3, Pages 288-302Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/03949370.2022.2044388
Keywords
gestural communication; hemispheric specialisation; handedness; primates; language evolution
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Funding
- European Research Council under the European Research Council [716931GESTIMAGE-ERC-2016-STG]
- French Agence Nationale de le Recherche [ANR-16-CONV-0002]
- Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University (A*MIDEX) [11-IDEX-0001]
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Research on gestures in baboons has shown potential evolutionary continuities with key properties of language, indicating that shared features of gestural communication between humans, great apes, and baboons may have played a critical role in the phylogenetic roots of language, dating back to a much older common ancestor.
Nonhuman primates mostly communicate not only with a rich vocal repertoire but also with manual and body gestures. In contrast to great apes, this latter communicative gestural system has been poorly investigated in monkeys. In the last 15 years, the gestural research we conducted in the baboons Papio anubis, an Old World monkey species, have shown potential direct evolutionary continuities with some key properties of language such as intentionality, referentiality, learning flexibility as well as its underlying lateralisation and hemispheric specialisation of the brain. According to these collective findings, which are congruent with the ones reported in great apes, it is thus not excluded that features of gestural communication shared between humans, great apes and baboons, may have played a critical role in the phylogenetic roots of language and dated back, not to the Hominidae evolution, but rather to their much older catarrhine common ancestor 25-40 million years ago.
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