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Figure 5. An overview of the experimental setup. Left: online version of the study. Right: setup in the field experiment. Taken from Ćwiek et al. (2021), under CC BY 4.0 license. needs much earlier than would be possible with speech (Barnes, 2010). A major problem with the assumption that human com- munication has its origin exclusively in gestures, however, is that it does not explain at what stage and why a switch from the visual modality toward the auditory modality should have taken place. Furthermore, it has long been assumed that vocalizations might be less depictive than gestures for the creation of novel form-meaning relations. However, a recent investigation has shown that vocaliza- tions have a much larger iconic potential than previously assumed and can, thus, ground meaning (Ćwiek et al., 2021). In two experiments, an online study and a field experiment, listeners from all over the world heard acous- tic signals that were created without using conventional language. These signals expressed a variety of basic con- cepts like fire, water, man, woman, snake, hunt, eat, big, or many that might have played a role in the communica- tion of our ancestors (see the Open Science Framework repository for examples at osf.io/4na58). Almost 1,000 participants from 28 languages and 12 language families listened to the vocalizations and selected what they felt was the intended meaning from among different options. Figure 5 presents how the procedures looked. In the online study, listeners chose 1 from among 6 potential concepts, whereas in the field experiment, they chose the meaning from among 12 pictures. This was done to make the setup accessible to people from different educational backgrounds. Against previous assumptions, the results of the two experiments showed that participants around the globe were able to comprehend the meaning of these concepts far above the chance level. Thus, the acoustic signal alone has the potential for humans to infer meaning without using language. Still, this does not imply that communi- cation necessarily started only with vocalizations. The emerging conclusion is that the interplay of gestures and vocalizations might have been crucial at the dawn of Summer 2022 • Acoustics Today 49