Shaping the evolution of human language

BBC News reports:

Researchers in the US say they have firm evidence that apes communicate using gestures - shedding light on the development of human language.

The team analysed the way bonobos and chimpanzees used hand and limb gestures to make themselves understood. The scientists found the apes used gestures more flexibly than the way they used facial and vocal expressions. They say the findings support the theory that human language developed through the use of hand gestures.

These research findings would seem to chime nicely with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran's ideas about overlapping cognitive processes for visual and auditory gestalts forming one basis of the evolution of human language. My speculation (which may very well not be original): having learned to gesture, did our distant ancestors take inspiration from the shapes both of the objects around them and of their own gestures to form the sonic shapes of their first, rudimentary words?