One of mankind’s greatest talents is our capacity to communicate in a complex and detailed manner. The ability to preserve and create knowledge over generations, collaborating on a worldwide scale beyond anything ever seen on Earth, is enabled by the Internet. However, much of the evolution of this skill, such as its origins, remains a mystery to this day.
The hypothesis that our earliest human ancestors grumbled at each other as a mode of communication was recently tested by a group of researchers who conducted a series of studies.
Because the primary role of language is to communicate meaning between individuals, the researchers investigated whether non-verbal cues such as hand gestures or non-verbal noises were more successful at conveying meaning.
Using non-verbal vocalizations and gestures, two groups of 30 participants from various cultural backgrounds were asked to attempt to express certain meanings to one another, rather like a game of charades. It was replicated with 10 sighted and 10 blind participants, who were charged with making gestured or non-verbal messages while a group of students attempted to figure out what they were trying to say.
The study’s results
Effective communication was twice as likely to occur when the producers gesticulated rather than vocalized, whether the producers were from different cultures or were blind or sighted. The gestured signs created by the producers were considerably more comparable to one another than the voiced signals produced by the producers – even those provided by the blind participants. Because there were no universal sounds they could use to encapsulate the concept in the absence of the word itself, for example, everyone represented the word ‘lock’ by turning a key, while there was no common action they could use to symbolize the meaning in the absence of the word itself.
The research presumes that our cognitive processes incorporating language have not changed greatly in the up to 500,000 years since it is believed that we first formed language; however, the scientists point out that it is possible that both aspects of communication evolved at the same time.
Simple things like shouting would be quite ubiquitous as well, so it’s likely that humans have always employed a mix of the two methods of communication.
