Humans began communicating with each other through hand gestures, a new study has concluded.
Cavemen communicated with each other through hand gestures
Researchers from the University of Western Australia asked volunteers to attempt to describe words using gestures or grunts and found that gestures are far more effective in communicating meaning - suggesting that actions are the root of human communication.
The experts said: "The universality of gesture means it is ideally suited to bootstrapping human communication among modern humans and therefore supports the hypothesis that gesture is the primary modality for language creation."
The boffins explained that gestures can be used by all humans and rubbished the theory that our ancient ancestors communicated through grunting.
They said: "People of all cultures gesture while they speak, blind people gesture, and hearing adults and children can successfully use gesture as their sole means of communication at the request of experimenters.
"The ubiquity of gesture, and its capacity to rapidly evolve into language, has led to the proposal that language originated in manual gestures rather than in vocal calls."