The image that prehistoric cavemen communicated with each other by means of low growls has banished researchers to the realm of fables.

How did human language come about? It is a question that still puzzles many scientists. Often our distant ancestors are portrayed as “grommers” who exchanged ideas through low guttural sounds. But to what extent is that image correct? Is this really how language has evolved? One new study suggests not.

Language

In movies and series, it seems generally accepted that prehistoric cavemen growl at each other as a means of communication. Yet we are not at all sure whether they really ‘talked’ to each other in this way. However, according to researcher Nicolas Fay, it is very important that we better understand what has been the cradle of human language. “Language is so valuable,” he says in conversation with Scientias.nl† “Both for our learning ability, for establishing relationships and so much more. That is why it is important to gain more insight into where language comes from from a fundamental research perspective.”

Hints

In the study, the researchers put it to the test. They recruited volunteers from both Australia and the Vanuatu archipelago. The participants were divided into groups and had to try to convey specific words using hand gestures or non-verbal sounds – a bit like the game of hints. What made it even more difficult was that the volunteers not only spoke completely different languages, but they were also very different culturally.

This experiment was then repeated with ten sighted and ten blind volunteers. Using hand gestures or non-verbal sounds, they had to make clear to a group of students what they meant.

hand gestures

The research leads to an interesting discovery. “We found that you can convey meaning much better with gestures than with grunts,” concludes Fay. In fact, the chance that an unspoken word was successfully understood by the other person – both during the first and during the second experiment – ​​was even twice as great with hand gestures. But why? “Gestures can be very ‘iconic’,” Fay explains when asked. “By this I mean that such gestures can be very similar to their meaning. This is very valuable when you can’t talk to each other. Moreover, gestures are more universal than sounds. Several participants often used the same gesture to convey the same word. And that makes communication more successful.”

Origin of human language

So it seems that gestures are a much better means of communication than grunts. And that has far-reaching implications for our idea of ​​the origin of human language. According to the researchers, the experiments show that it is very likely that our distant ancestors communicated with each other not through growls, but through hand gestures. “Theories about language origin are often speculative due to a lack of direct evidence,” Fay says. “But our study provides evidence that human language probably started with hand gestures.”

revised

It means rethinking the way prehistoric cavemen communicated with each other. They probably didn’t use their vocal cords, but their hands to convey simple ideas. Spoken language is believed to have first emerged in East Africa about 150,000 years ago.

Why spoken language beat hand gestures? “There are several explanations for this, all of which are speculative, by the way,” Fay said. “There is some evidence that speech is more efficient. In that sense, it makes sense that speech took over from hand gestures – so after the communication system was first established through gestures. The explanation I prefer is that, unlike the mouth, the hands are important for so many different actions. That is why I think it is quite logical that the mouth took over the communication task, so that the hands were freed.”