![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hominins in Ethiopia had a workshop making hand-axes out of obsidian 1.2 million years ago. This is more than twice as long ago as previous evidence of this kind of focused activity.
The article in Nature goes into a lot more detail, with color illustrations:
Present-day humans have some understanding of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures.
This study builds on earlier work showing that at least some gestures are consistent across ape species, and other gestures are consistent only within a species:but a gesture that means "give me that food" in chimp is "groom me" or "carry me" in bonobo.
The difficulty in carrying the research over to humans has been that we use a wider variety of gestures, combined with (spoken or signed) language: there isn't a single gesture for "come closer" or "give me that food." What these researchers did is ask humans to interpret chimpanzee and bonobo gestures, on video, edited to show only the ape gesturing, not what it was responding to, or how another ape responded to it. Humans consistently did better than random chance at identifying the meaning of the gestures.
On the other hand, the best accuracy was about 80%; it goes down for gestures that have more than one within-species meaning, and for gestures that have different meanings to chimps than to bonobos.
The article in Nature goes into a lot more detail, with color illustrations:
The standardized obsidian handaxes provide ample evidence of the repetitive use of fully mastered skills. This must have required a foundation of already developed knowledge and skills.
Present-day humans have some understanding of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures.
This study builds on earlier work showing that at least some gestures are consistent across ape species, and other gestures are consistent only within a species:but a gesture that means "give me that food" in chimp is "groom me" or "carry me" in bonobo.
The difficulty in carrying the research over to humans has been that we use a wider variety of gestures, combined with (spoken or signed) language: there isn't a single gesture for "come closer" or "give me that food." What these researchers did is ask humans to interpret chimpanzee and bonobo gestures, on video, edited to show only the ape gesturing, not what it was responding to, or how another ape responded to it. Humans consistently did better than random chance at identifying the meaning of the gestures.
On the other hand, the best accuracy was about 80%; it goes down for gestures that have more than one within-species meaning, and for gestures that have different meanings to chimps than to bonobos.
Tags:
