Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (21 page)

Bonobos apparently sometimes employ branch dragging for personal reasons. Ellen Ingmanson, who has worked for some years at Wamba, once saw an incident in which Mon, an adult male, used the activity as a wake-up call for a friend. Mon had climbed out of his nest one morning and was sitting on the ground, looking up at another nesting tree and a fruit tree, about twenty-five feet away. After a while he got up, selected a sapling, broke it off, and began branch dragging between the nesting tree and the fruit tree. Soon, a head appeared from the nest as Ika, another male, looked to see what was causing the commotion. Mon stopped his branch dragging, squeaked excitedly, and jumped around. But Ika disappeared back into his nest. Mon resumed branch dragging, and after about five minutes Ika finally appeared again and climbed to the ground. Mon stopped once again and became very excited. The two chimps then set off for the fruit tree. “Mon had succeeded in getting a friend to join him for breakfast.”
²⁴

Bonobos are often referred to as non-tool-users in the wild.
But branch dragging is clearly tool-use of sorts. Tool-use is a mechanism for solving problems. Common chimpanzees use sticks for extracting termites from mounds and stones for cracking nuts. That is readily recognized as tool-use. Pygmy chimps are blessed with plentiful food resources—they spend 25 percent less time foraging than do common chimpanzees. The problems they do face, however, are those concerned with controlling and manipulating social activity. Branch dragging constitutes tool-use in this respect, and indeed involves complex communication of a kind not thought possible in nonhuman primates.

The social skills that bonobos so excel at—including the exploitation of the power of sex—serve to make them the most successful of all primates, in respect of individual survival. Their devotion to reducing aggression in their midst optimizes bonobo individuals’ chances of reaching adulthood. “They prove that individuals can coexist without relying on competition and dominant-subordinate rank,” observes Kano.
²⁵
How ironic it is that so peaceable and personally successful an ape should face extinction by the hand of
Homo sapiens
.

5

Kanzi, a male bonobo, was born on 28 October 1980, and his entry into the world was as unusual as the things he would later enable us to learn about bonobos. His mother, Lorel, was on loan from the San Diego Zoo to the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, for breeding purposes. Because Lorel had been reared in the nursery rather than by her mother and because this was to be her first infant, I was concerned that she either might not know how to care for the infant, or might not wish to do so. I knew also that such problems could possibly be compounded by Lorel’s low ranking in the bonobo group, and therefore suggested that it might be wise to isolate her for the birth. San Diego Zoo, however, decided that she should stay with the group as this was presumed to be a more natural situation.

Each evening toward the expected birth date, someone from the Georgia State University Language Research Center would drive to the field station at Lawrenceville, twenty-seven miles northeast of Atlanta, to be on hand to witness the birth and call the veterinary staff in case of complication. Rose Sevcik was on duty on the twenty-eighth, and she called me as soon as she was certain that the birth had started. By the time I arrived, Kanzi had been born, a tiny ball of black fur with spindly arms and legs. The situation with the bonobo group seemed a little tense. Instead of resting with her baby, Lorel was pacing about the cage looking tired and bewildered. The other bonobos were fascinated by the
new infant and constantly pestered Lorel with requests to look at, prod, and hold the new baby. Finally, exhausted, she lay down and closed her eyes, with her arms around Kanzi as he clutched tightly to her waist, known as the ventrum, with his small hands.

Matata, one of the original three wild-caught bonobos in the Yerkes colony, approached Lorel and sat down quietly beside her, looking fondly at the new baby while cradling her own infant, Akili, in her lap. As Lorel peeked out of sleepy eyes, Matata gently caressed Kanzi’s tiny hands, face, and feet. Lorel saw that Kanzi was not objecting and her eyes closed with heavy fatigue. Noting this, Matata leaned down next to Lorel and slowly slipped Kanzi’s long, thin arms across her own ventrum. Lorel did not notice, so Matata carefully tugged on Kanzi’s spindly leg and also slipped it onto her tummy. Kanzi’s hand and leg reflexively gripped onto Matata. Lorel, at that point, seemed to nod her head as though passing from light sleep into a deeper stage and Matata, who is a keen observer, took account of this and used that moment quickly to pull the rest of Kanzi onto her ventrum. Kanzi, at once, clung to Matata, just as though she were his own mother. Lorel opened her eyes, looked at Matata, then down at her own ventrum and at once realized what had happened. She cried out, in a manner that could only be described as “plaintive” and tried to take Kanzi back from Matata. But Matata had already moved her own son onto her back and covered Kanzi so thoroughly by wrapping her legs and arms about him that Lorel could hardly see him at all. Lorel began following Matata around, tugging on her, trying to get Kanzi back. But she was hesitant to bite or attack Matata, perhaps because she feared that others would side with Matata, or perhaps because she did not want to chance hurting Kanzi. Matata was clearly determined to keep Kanzi, and Kanzi, less than thirty minutes old, had not had time to determine who his mother was, and so he clung to Matata and resisted the tugs and pulls of Lorel as well.

After several hours, Lorel gave up her attempts to pull Kanzi back and simply sat and watched Matata with her infant. Once Lorel was no longer trying to retrieve Kanzi, Matata began to hold him away from her body, as though she desired to look him
over carefully. She held Kanzi about fifteen inches out from her ventrum and gazed intently at him as he vigorously moved his arms and legs, seeking to regain the comfort of her lap. Matata seemed to be somehow testing Kanzi, both by holding him out when he was clearly uncomfortable and whimpering, and by biting down gently but firmly on his fingers until he stopped clinging to her. It began to appear as though she were vacillating between “playing” with Kanzi as if he were an interesting toy, and caring for him, as if he were her own infant. Or perhaps she was simply doing this to frustrate and test Lorel. Lorel certainly became agitated with each of Kanzi’s whimpers during these “inspections.”

Just then the veterinarian, Dr. Brent Swenson, arrived. The bonobos fear the veterinarian as it is his job to anesthetize them, and he uses a blowgun to do so. This darting is an unpleasant experience for all concerned and the bonobos attempt both to avoid and threaten him. When Matata saw Brent, she tried to get as far away as she could and hid Kanzi in her lap to protect him. Thereafter she treated Kanzi as her own son, never again exhibiting the unusual inspecting and toying behavior she had engaged in just prior to the appearance of the veterinarian. She was a devoted mother to both Kanzi and Akili, nursing them jointly with skill and adroitness. Lorel continued to sit by Matata and paid close attention to Kanzi for several days, but after that she gave up and treated him as though he were Matata’s infant.

Since Matata now had two infants, Yerkes offered to trade Akili for Kanzi and the San Diego Zoo agreed. They removed Akili and placed him in the San Diego group, while Matata and Kanzi traveled to the Language Research Center together. We kept Kanzi with his adopted mother to foster appropriate orientation toward his own species. Had Matata not “adopted” Kanzi in the way she had, the course of ape-language studies would have been entirely different, as Kanzi would have remained with Lorel and not been exposed to language during his infancy.

I had always been impressed by Matata’s evident intelligence and eagerness to communicate. She developed ways of letting me know quite clearly what she wanted. For instance, she would hand me her food bowl and push me toward the refrigerator when she was hungry, or point to the lock on the door when she wanted to go out. Matata had been part of the language program for one year prior to giving birth to her son Akili. During that time, she proved to be a willing and interested, though incompetent, study. She quickly understood that Sherman and Austin used the keyboard to communicate and that pressing the lexigrams was what achieved this feat. However, the idea that a specific lexigram was used in specific ways eluded her. Matata would take my hand and lead me to the keyboard, fully cognizant of what she wished to convey. However, once she began to use the keyboard, she would press any lexigram and then look at me as though I should now know her wish. Consequently, her desires and the lexigrams she chose to use to express them did not correspond on a reliable basis. Sometimes she pressed “juice” when she really wanted a banana, other times she pressed “groom” when she really wanted to go outdoors. Often, she did not reject the juice or the grooming, even if her real intent was different, as there was no reason not to accept the juice and the grooming that I offered her. How then did I know that the symbols she selected did not match her real intent? Generally, either the nature of her glance, or the events that she was attending to gave her away. For example, if Sherman and Austin had asked to go outdoors and were getting ready to do so, Matata often wanted to go with them. She would vocalize and look in their direction, and if I permitted, she would rush over to them. Consequently, in such a situation, pressing “groom” did not really seem to indicate what she wanted to say.

Perhaps our hopes had been too high for Matata. Her early training had not been as systematic as that received by Sherman and Austin. She had not spent the long months learning to discriminate lexigrams, to request food items from a dispenser, to comprehend and carry out requests, or to differentiate between naming things and asking for them. Matata seemed so intelligent
that we assumed she would be able to tell the lexigrams apart and utilize them for communicative ends.

Prior to this time, no bonobo had been language trained, and there were many reasons to suspect that Matata, as a bonobo, should do even better than Sherman and Austin. Robert Yerkes had observed that bonobos appeared to be intelligent and humanlike in many ways, and my earlier investigations of the gestural communicative skills of Matata, Lokelema, and Bosondjo had confirmed that.

Bonobos manifest a more intricate socio-communicative repertoire, including the use of more gestures and more vocalization, than common chimps do. These gestures are natural—that is, they are not trained but rather are reflective of the bonobo’s own inclinations to communicate. In a paper with my colleagues Kelly McDonald, Rose Sevcik, William Hopkins, and Elizabeth Rubert, I expressed my expectations this way: “Because elaboration of the gestural, visual, and vocal domains of communication must have occurred in evolution before the emergence of speech proper, the more extensive development of these skills in the pygmy chimpanzee, in contrast to other apes, suggests that they might be better prepared to acquire language.”
¹
Matata was to be the test of that proposition.