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The 1980s were also an exciting time in comparative psychology, as we learned about the communicative capacity of great apes, through the numerous ape-language studies and the long-term field studies, especially by Goodall. The 1980s were an exciting time in developmental psychology, with discoveries of the preverbal communicative capacity in the human species. We suggest that at this point in development (before human infants use lots of speech), nonverbal communicative gestures may be equally important for human and chimpanzee infants. We did not find strong evidence that the specific types of gestural environment experienced by young infants influenced the types of gestures that infants produce. Interestingly, we found that 1-year-old infants produced the gesture of “hold mutual gaze" and that the chimpanzee infants had a significantly higher rate than the human infants. Reports of species differences in gesturing in young infants, therefore, could be influenced by investigators’ choice of gesture type. Chimpanzee infants produced significantly higher rates of chimpanzee-usual gestures, and human infants produced significantly higher rates of human-usual gestures, but there was no significant species difference in the species-common gestures. We did find significant differences, however, when we considered the three types of gesture. We found no significant differences between groups or species in overall rates of infant-produced or infant-received gestures, suggesting that all of these infants produced and received gestures at similar levels. We classified the gestures into the following types: human-usual, chimpanzee-usual, and species-common and searched for within species and between species differences. We recorded gestures produced by infants and those produce by others and directed toward infants. In contrast to previous studies, we compared the species at the same age (12–14 months) and used multiple groups living in diverse socioecological settings for both species. We investigated the communicative gestures used by chimpanzee and human infants.