Great apes give one potential clue to the origins of language

So what does language mean for humanity?What does it allow us to do, and how did we come to have it?Exactly when we acquired this capacity is still an open question.Chimps and bonobos are our closest living relatives,but the lineage leading to humans split from the other great apes more than four million years ago.In between, there were many species all of them now extinct,which makes it very difficult to know if they had language or anything like it.Great apes give one potential clue to the origins of language, though:it may have started as gesture rather than speech.