Referentiality is a core property of language that allows us to refer to entities or events. While evidence that captive apes communicate referentially by pointing is well-established, evidence in the wild remains scarce. The chapter suggests that the near absence of referential gesturing in wild apes may result in part from an anthropogenic bias and overabundance of caution in determining what constitutes reference for apes. A framework is presented to explore potentially referential gestures more generously – considering gestures whose form resembles the physical form, direction, or target of the recipient’s desired behavioural reaction. The chapter applies the framework to a gestural dataset from a chimpanzee community in which four possible cases of pointing were previously detected (<0.001 per cent) and found that ~18 per cent of gestures contained potential directional information. Taking a broader perspective when examining referential information in chimpanzee gestural communication may help us get to the point of ape reference.