Chimpanzees pick up communication styles from their moms, not their dads

Human communication is a complex weave of words and gestures — a mix of vocal and visual signals.

"People use vocal and visual communication in a very rich and combined way," says Joseph Mine , a biologist at the University of Rennes in France.

But how and when this capacity originated is somewhat mysterious. It's not like the emergence of human communication is visible in the fossil record — there are no gestures enrobed in amber, no syllables imprinted upon prehistoric rock.

"So there's this big open question of how did human language evolve," says Mine. "How did humans or hominins communicate hundreds of thousands of years ago, or even millions of years ago?"

Mine is trying to answer that question by looking to one of our closest living relatives — chimpanzees. The idea is that