Hunting and the Development of Sign Language: A Cross-Cultural Test

Abstract

The hypothesis that sign language develops as a form of nonverbal communication to aid hunters in their coordinated stalking of game receives ethnographic support from a random sample of 29 "hunting" and "nonhunting" societies. Although not all hunting cultures sign, almost all signing cultures have a primary dependence on hunting for subsistence. A rival hypothesis that sign language develops as a form of intertribal communication also receives some statistical support, but sampling procedures prohibited an adequate test of this hypothesis. The hunting hypothesis was retested on a larger sample of 75 societies and again received strong ethnographic support.