The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal

Author:Frans de Waal
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0307407764
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2009-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

Pointing Primates

Nikkie, a chimpanzee, once showed me how to manipulate attention. He had gotten used to my throwing wild berries across the moat at the zoo where I worked. One day, while I was recording data, I had totally forgotten about the berries, which hung on a row of tall bushes behind me. Nikkie hadn’t. He sat down right in front of me, locked his red-brown eyes into mine, and—once he had my attention—abruptly jerked his head and eyes away from mine to fixate with equal intensity on a point over my left shoulder. He then looked back at me and repeated the move. I may be dense compared with a chimpanzee, but the second time I turned around to see what he was looking at, and spotted the berries. Nikkie had indicated what he wanted without a single sound or hand gesture.

That simple act of communication went against an entire body of literature that links pointing to language and has therefore no room for nonlinguistic creatures. Pointing, a so-called deictic gesture, is defined as drawing another’s attention to an out-of-reach object by locating the object in space for the other. There’s obviously no point to pointing unless you understand that the other has not seen what you have seen, which involves realizing that not everyone has the same information. It’s yet another example of perspective-taking.

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