Disco Arms Shake

A curious description of one of the 102 gestures that gorillas use to communicate.

Scientists at the University of St Andrews recently reported the results of research into the gestural communication of gorillas. One of the team, Professor Richard Byrne, explained:

There has always been speculation that the origins of human language might lie in gesture, an idea supported by the close proximity of the brain areas involved in language and gesture. Many researchers have therefore studied the gestural communication of the great apes for clues to the evolutionary origins of human gesture.

But there is a persisting puzzle: each population seems to use a somewhat different repertoire of gestures, suggesting that individuals learn their gestures; yet there is no sign of local “dialects” of gesture, group-specific gesture traditions, as would be expected if they learnt the gestures from each other.

After studying gorilla behavior at several sites, and exploring the archives of gorilla research, the scientists created a taxonomy of 102 distinct gesticulations:

Whilst some common gestures like “arm swing with object” and “tapping other” were shared by all groups they studied, others were found only at a few places; one, the “disco arms shake,” was unique to a single gorilla and performed only to a human, not to other gorillas.