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Here's your wiki for the de Waal reading.

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Ape gestures and language evolution

de Waal tests if gestures are a stronger and more flexible way of communicating than vocal/facial signals. They study two ape species, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. They identified 31 manual gestures and 18 vocal/facial signals from their study. They found that the vocal/facial signals used were very similar in both species while the gestures were very different. Bonobos used multimodal communication, using both gestures and vocal/facial signals to communicate with one another.

Interesting... -All primates use vocalization, posture etc. to communicate but only apes and humans use intended gestures. -blind people gesture just as much as sighted people to a blind audience.

. The conclusion seemed to be a little reserved because they study was based on observations and human interpretation. They also concluded that bachiomanual gesturing is more flexible and uses a higher mod of communication.

 Bickerton stated that these types of experiments do not give objective information because gestures can change within the contexts of the situation. Gestures needed to be toward someone else as well not only just a situation for example danger. Labels might make coding and categorizing very difficult because they are recorded and perceived by humans. Gestures are tied to contexts.