Humans and wild apes share many common gestures that indicate the same thing. Primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos use them to communicate with each other.
The BBC writes about this with reference to the research of St. Andrews University.
This means that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees used similar gestures, and that they may have been the "starting point" for our language.
“We know that all great apes — chimpanzees and bonobos — share about 95% of the gestures they use to communicate. So we already had a suspicion that this was a general ability to gesture that our last common ancestor might have had. But now we are absolutely certain that our ancestors started gesturing and that it was [reflected] in language," a researcher Kirsty Graham noted.
A group of researchers spent many years observing wild chimpanzees. They previously found that great apes use a "lexicon" of more than 80 gestures, each of which conveys a message to another member of their group.
The researchers used video playback experiments because this approach is traditional for testing language comprehension in nonhuman primates. Volunteers watched videos of chimpanzees and bonobos gesticulating, and then selected translation options from a list. Participants performed significantly better than expected, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures more than 50% of the time.
Gestures that humans are able to understand innately may form part of what Dr. Graham described as "an evolutionarily ancient, common vocabulary of gestures for all species of great apes, including us."