How the Hand Generated Language

Abstract

Hands and arms are important components of communication and interaction among individuals. From an evolutionary perspective, bipedalism made it possible to use the hands for communication by gestures and signs long before there was a spoken language. Speech as well as hand/arm movements are associated with the activation of Broca’s area in the left frontal cortex, and it appears that Broca’s area is involved in the organisation of speech as well as hand movements. In our normal body language and our communication with other individuals, gestures and hand movements are linked to speech in a natural way, reflecting overlapping representational areas of these functions in Broca’s area. The gene FOXP2, necessary for coordination of tongue and lip movements in a spoken language, seems largely to have appeared in the last 200,000 years of human development. Thus, the conditions necessary for fully developed speech seem to be have appeared late in the evolutionary process, about the time our own species, Homo sapiens, emerged.