After seeing my baby learn this gesture, I was wondering if it’s possible shaking your head to indicate ‘no’ comes from babies refusing food. Is there any evidence showing where gestures like this one originated? How many different cultures share them?
That’s always been my assumption. Wiki sez:
Huh, I thought it would be too obscure for Wikipedia. That’ll teach me to check first!
Nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia.
There’s a great book The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language that posits that gestures like the head-shaking “no” predate language and arose in the far evolutionary past. Other apes, particularly chimpanzees, also use the “no” gesture. Ape babies also use the “pick me up” gesture. The author discusses how, before we learned to speak, gestures were our main means of communicating. And many of them, like “no”, still persist, for instance putting your index finger to your mouth to indicate “be quiet”. It’s a fascinating read.
It does seem like turning your head away to the side is the best way to reject something so it makes sense that it would become the default “no” gesture. What’s interesting is that nodding isn’t entirely universal for agreement. This was explored in “The Human Animal” a miniseries by Desmond Morris produced by the BBC in the mid-1990s. In one culture (Greece?) they flick their head up in what looks more like a “huh neat” or “it’s over there” kind of gesture. In another culture (India?) they rock their head side to side in what looks more like an “eh maybe” or “I don’t know” motion. I don’t recall any others, or if there were peculiarities relating to “no” but the number of different gestures out there is quite fascinating.
Wasn’t it a gag in The Gods Must Be Crazy that one tribe shakes their heads to indicate ‘yes’?
No opinion but I thought the observation about babies was an intelligent observation and does make good sense.
It’s true in Bulgaria and a few other countries as well.