The Zoomorphology of Gestures: Interspecies Learning and Technical Invention in Early Human Evolution (ZOOGESTURES)

ZOOGESTURES brings together philosophical, anthropological, archaeological and primatological expertise to pry open the field of interspecies gestural studies in the hope to disclose a radically novel perspective on human technological origins and processes of technical innovation, adoption and adaptation. We argue it is an unknown unknown of interdisciplinary research on the evolution of technology that early technological niches are possibly co-constructed by humans and other animals, with salient animal others serving as model organisms to learn, translate and scaffold technical action. To address this, we suggest attention needs to be paid to the overlooked role of technical gestures in interspecies evolutionary dynamics. The project develops a new theoretical framework to achieve this aim, drawing on and reworking ideas across the anthropology and philosophy of technology, animal studies, the ecological and behavioural sciences and nascent Indigenous perspectives, defining technical gestures, co-learning communities and hybrid novelty at the human-animal nexus; it probes into archaeological and Indigenous/oral history records to for the first time identify and examine candidate historical cases of gesture-mediated multispecies technology, and conducts primatological fieldwork with wild sympatric primates in Africa to initially explore their attentional foci beyond species boundaries and to devise ecological experiments testing for the impact of novel gestural stimuli.