Chimpanzee Gestures

the syntax of sign languages seems to be beyond chimps, and is the thing comparative syntacticians tend to point to when claiming that language-using apes don't use language. for a discussion of bonobo language and the kinds of grammar it can be shown to have, consider reading this: http://kanzi.bvu.edu/4.%20Confrontation%20and%20support.pdf (they use a lexeme board and english, but i think their points are still clear). i do see syntactic structure in some ape language (such as that it is often reduplicative! -- i am thinking particularly of transcripts i've read of koko the gorilla's asl) but that's different from having a syntax the way human languages do.

no, gestures tend not to be universal among humans. pretty much any human gesture can be found to mean something else in some other culture. even the extended arm doesn't mean "come here" across humans; for example this datapoint:

GHANA

10 years ago while in Ghana, Africa, we were instructed not to make the
palm up gesture for come here (with all fingers or just 1) but rather to
hold hand palm down a "wave" four fingers towards self. The 1st is the way
you call a whore.

Kristy [2006]

the same data set contains one claim of universality:


I am almost 70. As a boy, if we thought a girl might go all the way we
would ask by getting her to shake hands. During the hand shake we take the
index finger and tickle her palm. If she agrees to do it, she tickles
back. A funny thing, If you do this to a female today, who has never heard
of this practice, She still knows what it means. Try it.

(the data set is here: http://www.lcdf.org/xwrits/GESTURES )

When I took my ASL signing deaf class to the zoo, all of the chimps, gorillas and bonobos would come crowding to the glass making gestures and being fascinated by us.

I've often wondered whether we were gesturing things that meant something to them, too.