Why Don't Apes Point?

Abstract

Chimpanzees gesture to one another regularly. Although some of their gestures are relatively inflexible displays invariably elicited by particular environmental events, an important subset are learned by individuals and used flexibly—such things as “arm raise” to elicit play or “touch side” to request nursing. In an experiment with apes and human children, Tomasello et al. had one person, called the “hider,” hide food or toy from the subject in one of three distinctive containers. Classically, human infants are thought to point for two main reasons: they point imperatively when they want the adult to do something for them; and they point declaratively when they want the adult to share attention with them to some interesting event or object. No one knows how human infants come to point for others. A much more productive question, and one that can currently lead the people to much more interesting lines of empirical research, is asking the question why apes do not even point.

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