About ZOOGESTURES
ZOOGESTURES is the acronym for “The Zoomorphology of Gestures: Interspecies Learning and Technical Invention in Early Human Evolution”, a collaborative pioneer project to investigate the overlooked role of nonhuman animal gestures in inspiring and scaffolding novelty, innovation and directional change in early human technological evolution funded by the VolkswagenFoundation over 4 years (2026-2029).
The project challenges traditional “species island” models of gesture-oriented research driven by the assumption that it is primarily group-level or species-level conspecifics that provide the relevant interlocutors and contexts of technical learning and knowledge transmission, or that, alternatively, technical novelty derives above all from other-disinterested, environment-directed try-and-error learning.
ZOOGESTURES proposes and explores – through an integrated theoretical and empirical research program – an alternative and at present unconceived scenario of technical innovation in early human evolution, rooted in the recognition that both gestural engagement with the world and social learning are likely key evolutionary factors. We argue that current interdisciplinary research on human technological origins at present overlooks the possible significance of interspecies interactions as well as cross-species gestural attunement and learning as key contexts of technical innovation and recursivity in the deep past. We propose that the acquisition and extension of human technical gestures was in part driven by observation of and engagement with salient nonhuman others, that nonhuman animals served as important inspirations and analogies for hominin technical action and parts of their material culture, and that the evolution of the human technological niche therefore yields a presently unaccounted for multispecies dynamic, which we seek to qualify and address for the first time through cross-disciplinary collaboration at the nexus of interdisciplinary anthropology of technology, multispecies archaeology, and cognitive primatology. Put differently, we propose that early trajectories of human technological practice record presently uncharted zoomorphisms and that these are central not only for the development of human cultural realities but have fundamentally shaped hominin technicity.
ZOOGESTURES thereby aims to combine and integrate multispecies archaeology, interdisciplinary anthropology of technology, and cognitive primatology to unlock an entirely new field of research – interspecies gestural studies – and to showcase its capacity to renew our understanding of human origins and the ‘general ecology’ of the human. To achieve this, the project pursues three objectives:
Objective 1: to identify and critique persistent anthropocentrisms and tropes of species island thinking in scholarly understandings of gestures, technical learning and innovation, as well as the deep-time origins of technology and its evolution, and to work towards a more inclusive framework.
Objective 2: to probe this alternative perspective reading key stages of human technological evolution documented by archaeologists “against the grain” and explore the active role and mark of nonhuman gestural ecologies in past human material culture, ethnographies of non-Western societies and Indigenous accounts and oral histories.
Objective 3: to deploy primatological fieldwork and cutting-edge methods to challenge current obsession with within-species gestural interaction and explore perceptive and attentional dynamics across species boundaries in living wild primates to re-calibrate expectations and defaults.
This will enable us to reformulate the problem of human technological origins as a question of shared multispecies life and the co-construction of technological niches and thus to defuse the problematic bind of cognitive vs. environmental explanations. ZOOGESTURES proposes that it is their shared animality, technicity, and creativity that renders humans and other animals partners in finding ever new ways of manipulating and altering their environments. Affective and embodied learning “across difference” and the standpoint-dependent insights that can be gleaned from broader, heterogenous “behavioural environments” must be brought to the centre of interdisciplinary evolutionary studies of technology, in particular since early hominins were often rare sights on the landscape and other animals the dominant keystone agents; accounting for the deep history of technology thus requires to examine technical gestures as embedded into their associated socio-zoo-technical systems, which are always multispecies.
ZOOGESTURES revolves around three interconnected work packages (WPs) to ensure project objectives will be met and to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-disciplinary integration:
WP1 A new theoretical framework of interspecies technological origins: brings together disparate ideas and concepts on multispecies dynamics of technological learning, innovation and evolution, reviews current understandings thereof and critiques them in light of their latent anthropocentrism, interrelates them in novel ways, and substantially expands and reworks them to better serve the project of interspecies gestural studies and multispecies technology.
WP2 Past and present socio-zoo-technical systems: mobilizes and integrates archaeological, ethnographic and oral history sources to re-evaluate technical novelty and the role of interspecies learning in the formation of the Pleistocene and earlier Holocene archaeological record and its various inscriptions in Indigenous knowledge systems.
WP3 Sympatric primate ecologies and human-primate co-attention: conducts primatological fieldwork and controlled ecological experiments to test whether observation of other species’ gestures shapes the attentional field of humans and wild primates in different parts of Africa.
