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Anyone who’s hung out with babies knows how eager they are to communicate, even if they can’t do it very well. One way they do this is with the gesture of pointing, sticking out the index finger to indicate some object without touching it. Babies all over the world point in roughly the same way, starting at around 9 to 14 months. It’s a fundamental part of human interactions, as borne out by so many emojis.

But as important as pointing is to us, scientists we