'Hand Gestures' were human's first mode of communication: study claims

A recent study has proven that early homo sapiens used hand gestures and signs to communicate with each other.

According to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Western Australia, our ancestors, rather than grunting and grumbling, began communicating with each other via hand gestures.

According to Daily Mail, the research has proven that hand gestures and signs were far more effective in communicating and more understandable across different cultures.

The research was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The researchers said that ‘The universality of gesture means it is ideally suited to bootstrapping human communication among modern humans and therefore supports the hypothesis that gesture is the primary modality for language creation.’

The researchers said that ‘People of all cultures gesture while they speak, blind people, hearing adults and children can successfully use gesture as their sole means of communication.’

The researchers on basis of their study, claim that the ubiquity and capacity of hand gestures to rapidly evolve into language proves that language originated in manual gestures rather than in vocal calls.

The researchers carried out an experiment to test their hypothesis.

They selected 30 people each from Vanuata and Australia for the experiment and made them play a charade-like game.

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In the first round of the experiment, one person had to guess a word that the other person acted out using signs and gestures. Meanwhile, in the second round, the person tried to act out the word using grunts and grumbles.

The results revealed that the hand signs and gestures were far more effective in communicating than grunting and grumbling.

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