By: Jason Shen

Scientists have shown that humans appear to have the ability to understand the Ape’s signs.

Apes have their own system of gestures to show what they mean. Chimpanzees and bonobos use about 80 different gestures to show what they mean. For example, a gesture the researchers call big loud scratch means: help pick insects off of me.

Researchers Kirsty Graham and Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St. Andrews wanted to see if humans with no training or experience could understand the gestures of chimpanzees and bonobos. The researchers created a game for people to play online. The game was simple. People watched short videos of apes making a gesture. Then they had to choose the correct meaning of the gesture out of four possible answers.

For the videos, the researchers chose 10 of the most common gestures used by chimpanzees and bonobos. Thousands of people played the game. The researchers were surprised to find that people were able to choose the correct meaning of the gestures over 50% of the time. That’s twice as good as people would be expected to do by chance.

For some of the gestures, people were able to choose the correct meaning about 80% of the time, one example of this was the gesture of wiping the mouth, which people correctly guessed meant: give me that food. Scientists believe that humans may have a natural ability to understand the gestures of apes, but it’s not clear why.