Could humans learn to ‘speak ape’? This quiz will help you find out

Bonobos have up to 60 gestures RexPeople often debate whether apes could ever learn to talk – but a new project is tackling the problem from a rather different angle.

Can humans work out, just by instinct, what apes are saying to each other?

Chimpanzees and their close relatives bonobos use more than 60 different gestures to communicate with each other – and many are the same across both species.

Scientists from St Andrew University have created an ‘ape dictionary’ to help understand these gestures – and now hope to see if humans can understand the gestures too.

In an online experiment, users are challenged to identify what bonobos and chimpanzees are ‘saying’ in a selection of videos.

Try it here.

The researchers write, ‘Using our long-term studies we have been able to show that many of the gesture types that great apes use to communicate with other apes are shared across the species – in chimpanzees and bonobos it’s almost 100%.

‘If many great ape gestures, and perhaps the gesture meanings, are shared across all the other apes that suggests that they may have a very old evolutionary origin.

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‘So it’s possible that while modern humans use language to communicate the same requests we might still be able to recognise the gestures and what they mean in other apes.’