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 ...

Many hand gesture meanings go back millennia, but if you’ve spent any time online lately, you know that hand gestures are having a moment right now—and not always a graceful one.

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." ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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.