Heitmann, 35, has been collecting examples of these movements for the past three years. In 2019, she put out an open call for “donations,” inviting people to contribute their own habits and ...

For the most part, our gestures—hand movements and facial expressions—are connected to what we say. They interact with language when we speak, but gestures are not language." ...

Handshake. Let’s take our history of hand gestures back to the basics, starting with the good ol’ handshake. Whether you’re greeting someone for the first time, closing a deal or making ...

“We do see pretty complex communication by hand gestures among the great apes, which is our closest evolutionary ancestor,” says Futrell. A study published in the March 2022 edition of the journal ...

Instead, gestures that accompany speech are a second channel of information. Subjects watch a film in which a cat runs but are told to lie and say it jumped. They do so in words—while their ...

If you’re traveling or doing business outside the U.S., beware! These seemingly innocuous hand gestures are considered rude in many parts of the world. “Hand gestures can vary significantly in ...

Gestures such as a handshake, a finger to the lips to say 'quiet', or the shrug, are so widely understood that they are an assumed common language. Philosopher and author Damon Young has analysed ...

They show that our species can make a pretty good guess of the meanings of chimp and bonobo gestures, another hint that language may have evolved from an elaborate system of hand and body signals.