Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
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Matata, suffered through, revealed his skills. On a day when Matata had been taken away for breeding and Kanzi was alone with Savage-Rumbaugh, he began using the keyboard to communicate, producing “120 separate utterances, using 12 different symbols.” She hadn’t realized that he’d been learning English naturally, the way human children do, just by “being exposed to it.”
Kanzi has since become a celebrity, demonstrating his talents on CNN and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Given that a bonobo’s vocal cords are not suited to human language, he has to communicate using his keyboard or a sheet printed with lexigrams. When a lexigram is lacking, he composes, asking for pizza by pointing to “cheese,” “tomato,” and “bread.” He can also understand spoken language and has responded correctly to sentences such as “Could you carry the television outdoors, please?” and “Can you put your shirt in the refrigerator?” even though Savage-Rumbaugh made no gestures and had her face covered. He has also learned to make stone tools, build fires, and cook.
I spoke to Savage-Rumbaugh by Skype not long after she had been selected as one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people for a body of work that spans questions of primatology, language acquisition in humans and apes, and cognitive science. I wanted to understand what had won her a place on the list, and I began with the question that I most often heard when I told others about the project I was embarking on.
“Why bonobos? What makes them interesting?”
At first, she answered simply: “In terms of anatomy, genetics, and personality, bonobos are the most humanlike of all apes. . . . They most closely touch the origins of humankind. . . . We still carry so much genetic heritage in common with the bonobo that only by studying them can we have any inkling of what might actually have happened in the past.”
“And this is more true of bonobos than of chimpanzees?” I asked.
“When the data is fully in,” she said, “I think it will be seen that bonobos are more fully related to humans in how their genes express themselves.”
Much of what I had read about bonobos was based on scientists’ field observations, but there’s a line between what we can understand as researchers and what we learn by living with another creature, by sharing in its daily life. Savage-Rumbaugh had worked with bonobos for more than three decades, taking part in their culture while they studied hers, and I asked what this had taught her.
“Freeing oneself absolutely,” she said, “from any thought or tendency toward aggression, and focusing on group love and cohesion—and I don’t mean sex, I mean love—is the way of the bonobos. It’s a message that humanity needs to try to understand.”
“But don’t they have conflict the way we do?” I asked. She acknowledged that they did, often behaving like humans by screaming at each other and showing off their strength.
“But,” she added, “they tend to find ways not to actually harm each other. They search for that. . . . Working with bonobos has given me a perspective on humanity, a perspective on myself that I could never otherwise have had. . . . Jane Goodall changed humanity’s view of itself when she revealed through her efforts with National Geographic that humankind shared a feeling world with chimpanzees. . . . With Kanzi, it has been shown that truly for the first time there are other animals on the planet that can share a language, an intellectual, thinking world with human beings. You put those two together, and you have to ask what is human. So Kanzi is stretching the definition of human. He’s forcing a redefinition of what humanity means. And that for some is intriguing and fascinating. For others, it is very uncomfortable. In part, you can be influential because you upset the social system. Kanzi upsets the social norm.”
If Time had acknowledged the importance of Savage-Rumbaugh’s work, I realized, it was also because of what it says about our dynamic nature: that what we consider human can shift drastically, just as Kanzi is learning across cultures and expanding his notion of self.
“The important aspect of that message,” Savage-Rumbaugh told me, “is that humanity isn’t stuck in the current rut. . . . We might consider ourselves a naked ape, but we have the capacity to be, let’s say, a godlike ape. We can do far more than we’re doing. We have limited ourselves and our understanding of our biology—our understanding of how we must structure the world—by the past. And we don’t have to continue to do that. If Kanzi can learn a language, what can human beings learn? We can certainly learn how to get along.”
I was surprised when I heard the words godlike ape, but Savage-Rumbaugh’s idea wasn’t new; humans often admire and tell stories about those with transformative powers.
“We’re just on the cusp,” she said, “of really understanding how brains interact. . . . We have thought of ourselves as individual sacks of skin. We’re far more connected than we’ve ever understood. And bonobos have almost a sixth sense. They have an understanding of their connectedness. And when we are able to finally grasp and measure that scientifically, I think we’ll be able to know what it means when we say humans have vibes or humans react with each other. I don’t think that’s just a phrase. I think there’s something going on that’s really happening between us, but that linguistically we have, through our culture, shut out. And bonobos haven’t shut that part of themselves out. I want people to realize that we’re just on the cusp of understanding the most fascinating species on the planet—not that elephants and dolphins and others aren’t—but we’re on the cusp of understanding that species and we’re about to decimate it in the Congo.”
In her writings, Savage-Rumbaugh explores the question of bonobo cultures, whether they, like human cultures, exist and are taught, exerting an influence on the instinctive behavior of apes. She describes how bonobos and humans who live together come to share a hybrid culture, an observation that leads naturally to speculation as to how humans might learn a new way of being. Simply looking at the history of human culture reminds us of the degree to which it shapes us, leading us to select for certain genetic traits, the most obvious being the ideas of beauty that we might value at any given time. Culture may become the most significant element of the environment to which we adapt.
I was eager to meet bonobos, to understand what bond they could share with us, how we could interact, and how spending time with them might shift my views. Savage-Rumbaugh was living with bonobos on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, at the Great Ape Trust, a research facility the philanthropist Ted Townsend had created.
It was April when I visited, the sun warm though the air was still cool, the land yet to bloom. A grove of leafless trees and a small lake separate the tall, electrified fence topped with barbed wire from the Trust’s two concrete buildings. Tyler, the laboratory supervisor, a man in his twenties, showed me into the bonobo building and let me watch as he ran experiments with a fourteen-year-old female bonobo, Elykia (“hope” in Lingala, the lingua franca of the western Congo). He told me I’d have to sit in the hallway and stay still, that bonobos were generally shy. He went into a small room next to a glass-walled chamber with a computer touch screen.
A doorway in the back of the chamber opened into the area where the bonobos lived. Elykia entered through it on all fours, craned her neck, scanning the inside, then moved fluidly, rapidly, onto the platform near the touch screen. She gazed out and saw me, her large black eyes opening wide, before she fled in a black blur.
“She’s just being dramatic,” Tyler called to me. “She’ll be flirting with you in no time.”
She neared again, looking in, and made a high-pitched, birdlike sound before bounding to sit on the platform. Though I’d read Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano’s description of hearing bonobos in the Congo, like “hornbills twittering in the distance,” I was startled by how different their calls were from the barks and low hoots of the chimpanzees I had seen in zoos.
Elykia glanced around and settled in. Lexigrams appeared on the screen, and she hesitated before touching one with a fingertip. Her hands resembled my own but were long, with more distance between each knuckle. The muscles of her arms were finely shaped, like those of an athlete. She had somewhat less hair than the wild bonobos I had seen in pictures, since captive bonobos can become restless