# Do Great Apes Use Iconic Gestures?

## TL;DR

This paper explores whether great apes use iconic gestures, suggesting that such gestures may be a precursor to human language evolution.

## Contribution

The paper challenges existing theories by proposing that ape gestures are homologous to human iconic gestures.

## Key findings

- Current theories of ape gesturing may not fully explain the variability and context of their gestures.
- Ape gestures may be homologous to human iconic gestures, suggesting a shared evolutionary basis.
- Iconicity could be a critical precursor to the development of language.

## Abstract

Many researchers in cognitive science and linguistics now recognize that iconicity—perceived resemblance between the form and meaning of a signal (e.g., a word, sign, or gesture)—is an essential property of language, playing vital roles in its processing, learning, and historical development. Iconicity is also fundamental to the human ability to create meaningful new signals without reliance on convention. This iconic turn raises a critical question for the study of language origins: Do great apes use iconic gestures? Apes are well documented to use a flexible and wide‐ranging repertoire of gestures, and many appear to be iconic representations of actions, including directive touches, visual directives, and pantomimed actions. However, the most widely accepted theories—ontogenetic ritualization and biological inheritance through phylogenetic ritualization—argue that this apparent form‐meaning resemblance is not psychologically real to the apes using the gestures. They argue instead that effective actions are channeled into gestures through repeated use, either through an individual's experience or over generations of evolution. Yet, it is increasingly recognized that these theories cannot account for the variability and contextual tuning of ape gestures. Alternatively, reasoning from cognitive theories of human gesture and iconicity as rooted in sensorimotor simulation and mental imagery, apes may use a range of gestures that appear homologous to the iconic gestures of humans, even if comparatively restricted in imaginative scope and anchored heavily in a here‐and‐now context. This fundamental capacity for iconic gesturing may have been a critical precursor to the evolution of language.

Iconicity is increasingly recognized as a core property of language, raising the evolutionary question of whether great apes use iconic gestures. This article challenges current theories of ape gesturing, arguing that many ape gestures are homologous to human iconic gestures, indicating a crucial role for iconicity in language evolution.