Humans and wild apes share a common language.
Humans and chimps are able to communicate
A new study has revealed that people can understand many gestures that wild chimps and bonobos use to communicate.
The findings - which have been published in the scientific journal PLOS Biology - suggest that the last common ancestor that humans shared with chimps used similar gestures and these could have been a "starting point" for our language.
Lead researcher Dr. Kirsty Graham - from St Andrews University - believes that the gesture-based way of communicating is shared by other species of great apes, including gorillas and orangutans.
She told BBC News: "Human infants use some of these same gestures, too.
"So we already have a suspicion that this was a shared gesturing ability that might have been present in our last shared ancestor.
"We're quite confident now that our ancestors would have started off gesturing, and this was co-opted into (our) language."