14 DAY TRIAL // When playing with a dog, if you point at something, the dog looks at your finger and not at the thing you are pointing at. Why is this? And why it's impossible even to teach the dog to look at what you are pointing at? The reason is that the dog is incapable of attributing intentions to you - in other words, generally speaking, it cannot understand your behavior as being oriented toward something, it can only understand your behavior in terms of your past behavior. If you repeat the same thing, it can than relatively easily understand you, in fact it can understand virtually any behavior which is based on regularities. But, unlike us, it doesn't know what to expect when anything new is involved.
Scientists have now discovered that chimpanzees not only can understand the behaviors of others by attributing intentions to them (this has been demonstrated in lab experiments), but that even in the wild they make use of this capacity. Wild chimpanzees commonly use referential gestures (pointing at things) to communicate with each other. A baboon for example cannot tell another baboon, "Scratch me here!", pointing at some spot. Chimpanzees not only can, but they are routinely doing it.
Until recently, referential gestures have been reported only in captive chimpanzees interacting with their human experimenters and in human-raised or language-trained apes. Simone Pika of the University of St. Andrews in Fife, United Kingdom, John Mitani of the University of Michigan and their colleagues observed the Ngogo community of chimps in Kibale National Park, Uganda and found evidence for the widespread use of a referential gesture by chimpanzees in the wild.
In case of the "directed scratch" one chimpanzee was making a relatively loud and exaggerated scratching movement on a part of his body that could be seen by his grooming partner. In the majority of cases, the indicated spot was groomed immediately afterward by the other chimp. Interestingly, such scratch gesture occurred more often between pairs of high-ranking males then among other chimpanzees.
This provides further proof of how connected we are with the animal kingdom. The difference between us and the chimpanzees seems to be only quantitative - we are better at attributing intentions to others and we are capable of understanding much more complex intentions - and not qualitative - we don't have "something" which they completely lack.
Photo credit: Simone Pika