Free Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Page A

while also beginning a behavioral project in which I observed four mothers and their infants. I was interested in infant development—the stages of maturation through which youngsters pass. Thelanguage project fascinated me, but I recognized that I could not understand what chimpanzees were doing with signs until I first understood chimpanzees far better. What kinds of things did they communicate spontaneously to each other and how did they do so? Were their nonverbal communications simply unconscious emotional expressions as all the literature at the time maintained? If so, why were their signs suddenly “expressions of conscious willed intent?”
    It made no sense to me that if you held up an object and taught a creature to place its hands in a certain position when you did so, that somehow this procedure led to the magic of symbolic awareness and the ability deliberately to communicate ideas and thoughts to others. I felt that capacity had to be present already in the creature. Additionally, perhaps because I had a two-year-old son of my own at the time, I was beginning to recognize that something seemed to be missing during my attempts to communicate with the signing apes. I recognized that they could successfully request objects using appropriate signs, but I began to be uneasy about how much they actually comprehended. The unease would always emerge when I tried to engage in true communication, that is, when I asked them a question for which I did not already know the answer.
    This missing component could similarly manifest itself whenever I asked the chimps to do simple things, such as to hand me a familiar object. Unsure how to respond, they would often begin to sign back rather than try to do what I asked. Similarly, if I asked them a question, such as “Where shall we go?” or “What shall we do?” they would frequently string together a variety of symbols they knew, particularly ones we had been using recently, in the apparent hope of hitting on one that sounded good to me. It was impossible to avoid the overriding impression that my son was far more deliberate in his attempts to communicate and that his understanding of simple requests and questions went considerably beyond that of the apes. The apes often seemed not to realize that they were being asked a “true” question, that is, an open-ended one that they could answer in any way they wished.
    Of course, they were queried all the time with questionslike “What’s this?” “Who’s that?” “Where’s X?” but these questions always had a “correct” answer. That is, if asked the name of a person, the chimps were expected to produce the correct name. Questions such as these revealed little about what the chimp itself wanted or thought; they were simply rhetorical questions that required a signed response.
    I began to worry about what this meant, and tried to talk with Roger about it on several occasions. Roger was never unwilling to talk about such issues, but he seemed to be of the opinion that it was more or less impossible to “get inside” a chimp’s mind and therefore the only reasonable thing to do was to take the sign at face value and focus on questions that had clear answers. Scientifically, I had to agree with his stance, yet I knew that if I regularly took such an approach to my son’s language, our communication would soon cease to be a very satisfying affair for either of us. It was important that he understand the things I was trying to tell him, and that he express his thoughts, rather than just answer questions designed to test his knowledge.
    Then Pancho came along. Pancho’s imminent arrival at the institute caused great excitement because he was said to be a pygmy chimpanzee (
Pan paniscus)
, the rare and exotic cousin of the common chimp (
Pan troglodytes)
. Pygmy chimps, or bonobos as they are known, are more humanlike than common chimps in many ways, including being more vocal and more communicative and having