Spatial Reference in a Bonobo Gesture

Great apes frequently produce gestures during social interactions to communicate in flexible, goal-directed ways [1–3], a feature with considerable relevance for the ongoing debate over the evolutionary origins of human language [1, 4]. 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 [1, 5] 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 [6]. 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. •We describe the habitual use of a human-like beckoning gesture in bonobos•The gesture functions to solicit a distant partner to jointly retreat for sex•Production is intentional, and recipients’ responses indicate comprehension•The gesture refers to the desired travel path in a potentially iconic manner Genty and Zuberbühler show that bonobos are capable of producing human-like beckoning gestures to persuade a distant recipient to approach. Analyses demonstrate that the gesture has intentional, iconic qualities in depicting the desired travel direction and path, suggesting that spatial reference evolved before the ape-human split.