Does pointing—or rather the ability to fully understand it—represent a critical step in the evolution of language?
Even so, Tomasello's laboratory found that apes were very poor at understanding a human pointing gesture that conveyed information, such as, for example, the location of a hidden object. Does pointing—or rather the ability to fully understand it—represent a critical step in the evolution of language? The claim struck Lyn, who worked with bonobos that are now at the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative, as absurd. “My apes understood when I pointed to things all the time,” she says. But when she set up pointing experiments with chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, she was surprised to find that the apes there did not understand her pointing well at all. Then she went back to the bonobos in her lab and tested them. All of them did.