Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (3 page)

In addition to the force of delivery produced by the wrist snapping backward during throwing, it is also important to deliver your blow to the core accurately if you need to detach a flake. Several of us had bruised fingers after the afternoon’s stone-knapping excursion, suggesting that, accurate though we might be as a species, as individuals we needed practice.

Bill Calvin was likely correct in his suggestion that throwing ability had been selected for in the course of human evolution. But accurate throwers also had the potential skills to make stone tools. Could throwing as a defensive device have paved the way for the deliberate construction of stone tools? Certainly to use throwing as a means of defense, it would help to be a biped and to have a wrist that could snap backward to launch the missile. Evolution often finds a way to make interesting and unexpected connections between anatomy and behavior. For instance, bird feathers might have evolved initially as a means of insulation, but they are essential for the behavior we call flight.

Our conference, which was called “Tools, Language, and Intelligence: Evolutionary Implications,” was searching for evolutionary links between language, tools, and anatomy that could have led to the emergence of the bipedal, large-brained, technological creature that is
Homo sapiens
. As a psychobiologist, I found the neurobiology of stone throwing and the skills of stone knapping entirely new, and I was intrigued. As I walked on the beach, I attempted to integrate these ideas with my own knowledge of how apes came to understand and effectively employ both tools and language. Suddenly, I noticed the outline of a dog standing on a slight rise, about ten yards ahead of me, motionless.

Being accustomed to encountering abandoned dogs in the
forest around my laboratory, I didn’t take much notice initially. Then another appeared to my right, and then another. Soon there were at least half a dozen, and they began to emit a low, ominous growl as they slowly formed a tight circle about me with their heads lowered and all eyes focused directly on me. I remembered having heard about packs of feral dogs in the region, wild and isolated as it was, and as the circle began to tighten, I came to the distinct conviction that I was being hunted. I looked back toward the castle and realized that no one else was either up or outdoors, and through the thick walls no one could even hear a scream. Thus I did not bother.

My memory flashed back to when I was five years old and a single dog had approached me growling in exactly the same way. I recalled standing my ground as long as I could and then turning and running in terror. As soon as I began to run, the dog attacked. I was not about to run now. But what else could I do? A vision of a naked prehominid standing on a similar windy bank, encircled by predators of some odd form, flashed in my mind. This prehominid female leaned down, picked up a rock, and threw it with great force. I did the same.

Luckily, I scored a direct hit on the buttocks of one of the dogs, and the recipient yelped. Hearing this, the others began to back off. I followed them, still throwing, to show that I intended to take the offensive while I had the upper hand. Finally the pack turned and fled. I hurried back to the cliff path that led to the safety of the hotel, realizing with a new appreciation that Bill Calvin certainly had a point: A bipedal creature devoid of natural weapons can do much to ensure its survival with an accurate, powerful throw. From that moment on, speculations regarding the “survival value” of various skills supposedly possessed by our ancestors took on a more vivid realism for me. These weren’t just academic musings we were engaged in. We were touching upon the real, honest-to-goodness life events that determined whether or not a given individual lived to be a mother or a grandmother and thus whether or not there were beings to carry on the human form.

For the two decades I have known and studied chimpanzees, I have been attempting to discern the degree to which they can think and communicate as we do. For many reasons—some justified, some not—this work has been among the most controversial areas of academic endeavor. The initial efforts of ape-language researchers, in the 1960s and early 1970s, were hurriedly greeted with acclaim by the popular and scientific press alike. Newspapers and scientific journals declared the same message: Apes can use symbols in a way that echoes the structure of human language, albeit in a modest manner. Symbol use heralded an insight into the evolutionary connection between ape and human brains, it was said. The symbols were not in the form of spoken words, of course, but were produced variously as hand gestures from American Sign Language, as colored, plastic shapes, and as arbitrary lexigrams on a computer keyboard.

But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this fascination turned to cynicism. Linguists asserted that apes were merely mimicking their caretakers and that they displayed no languagelike capacity at all. At best, critics viewed the research as flawed; at worst, they suggested it was an example of either egregious self-deception or outright fraud. Multiple reasons lay behind this dramatic shift of opinion, some scientific, some sociological, and I will explore some of these reasons later.

These were trying times, as all scientists working in the field were peremptorily accused and convicted of “poor science,” whether guilty or not. Most linguists and psychologists simply wanted to forget apes and move ahead with what they viewed as the “proper study of man”—generally typified by the analysis of the problem-solving strategies of freshmen students. These researchers did not want to be bothered with questions about whether or not an ape knew what it was saying.

From my earliest exposure to apes, I recognized there would be considerable difficulty in determining whether or not they employed words with intent and meaning in the same way that we did. I also believed that the pioneers in the field of ape language had not fully grappled with the issue of word
meaning. Because the intellectual excitement at uncovering languagelike faculties in apes had been intense, the pressure to overinterpret was immense. It seemed that anything an ape signed was accepted, so much so that ape-language research came to be labeled a “nonscience”—to some, it even became synonymous with nonsense.

I persisted in trying to come to grips with the essence of ape language only because, having been granted the opportunity to come to know apes better than I knew most people, I had no doubt they had a great deal to tell us about who we humans were, where we came from, and where the biological limits or constraints upon our species were to be found. I also believed that many behavioral scientists were wasting their efforts in attempting to develop conceptual models of the different “logical functions” of animal and human minds by comparing rats, pigeons, and college freshmen. Apes share 99 percent of our DNA and have a developmental period clearly as profound and plastic as our own. Why were we not trying harder to understand what apes could and could not do, what sort of creatures they were and were not?

From 1975 to 1990, I searched for scientifically credible ways to approach these fundamental questions about apes and their intellectual and emotional capacities. By 1990, the year of the Wenner-Gren conference, I knew that at least some of this work was reaching an audience, or I would not have been invited to the conference. Perhaps there I could start to explain what I had learned. At least in such a conference, I assumed, other scientists would have to listen whether they wished to or not. Unlike most meetings, they couldn’t elect simply not to attend the paper on ape language. I would at least have a chance to begin to tell my story or, more accurately, Kanzi’s story.

Like all invitees, I had written a scientific paper for the event, describing my research and conclusions. The papers, after revision, were to be published together as a conference volume. But even though I could describe on paper, with proper scientific documentation, what Kanzi did, I knew that I needed to show people images of Kanzi as a living, breathing, thinking
being. My words and numbers were but the pale bits and fragments we call data, data that was dwarfed by the presence and power of Kanzi himself.

Even reducing Kanzi’s 150-pound frame to a small, two-dimensional television screen seemed to do him an injustice. Still, I knew his ever alert and questioning intellect would convey the presence of mind within the apelike form. Images of Kanzi never fail to have a message; they announce, “I am here, I am Kanzi, I am an ape, I am thinking about my actions, and I am listening to what you have to say to me.” Never could any numbers that I might compile convey this message to other scientists, but I knew Kanzi himself could do so. Thus I prepared for Cascais a forty-five-minute video that illustrated the kinds of things Kanzi could do.

Nevertheless, I felt hesitant when I arrived in Cascais—perhaps because of the countless past occasions when people had refused to listen to new data and new interpretations, simply because it was ape-language research. Shortly after I arrived at the castle, I met Sydel Silverman, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, who invited me to lunch. She showed a great interest in apes and what it was like to work directly with them. Consequently, I used this opportunity to tell her that I wanted to show a videotape during my presentation, as so many questions were hard to answer with words alone.

She seemed agreeable to the general idea, but upon checking the schedule concluded that I could be permitted only a five-minute slot for my video of Kanzi—and this would have to be allotted at the end of the meeting. It seemed that many scientists who had been studying apes in the wild were also going to be at the meeting and they also wished to present videotapes. Their tapes would be given priority because the behaviors they would be showing were natural. If wild apes were allotted several hours of “visual time” and Kanzi only five minutes, it was clear that the doubts about ape-language work would have little chance of being challenged.

I was disappointed; in fact, at that point I would have been happy to leave. But leaving is something you do not do at Wenner-Gren conferences no matter how much you may want
to. For one thing, they had taken my passport upon arrival at the castle—just to check on things, they assured me.

This meeting was to be different from others in recent memory, Silverman told me, because it had as its focus the “big questions” of anthropology—the questions that lie at the roots of the field but that somehow had been ignored in the past decade. Well, I certainly had been wrestling with some of those “big” questions; didn’t anyone want to see visual documentation of what I had learned?

The meeting was organized by Kathleen Gibson, an anthropologist, and Tim Ingold, a sociologist. Together they persuaded the Wenner-Gren Foundation that anthropology was ready for a new look at human evolution. Earlier, at another meeting in Trieste, Italy, Ingold and Gibson had inevitably found themselves discussing the confluence between the most basic of anthropological and sociological issues. Gibson wondered how our past shaped our abilities to perceive and organize our societies, and Ingold wondered how our societies had shaped and organized our perceptions of the world and consequently our history. In essence, they felt that science could no longer avoid the central Big Question: “What is the nature of the human mind, how did it arise, and how does the construction of mind affect mind itself?”

This question has gnawed at our species for millennia; philosophers, laymen, and theologians alike have grappled with it since the dawn of the human mind, and it was to become the subsuming focus of all our minds during that week on the beach. What is the relationship between humans and the rest of the animal world? Is there a smooth biological continuity between our minds and those of other creatures? Or is there a sharp discontinuity, a gulf so qualitatively great as to be unbridgeable?

The scientists who attended the Wenner-Gren conference brought with them the bulky baggage of European man’s attempts to come to grips with his place in the natural order of
things. In the pre-evolutionary world of Western science, the place of
Homo sapiens
in nature was presumed to be revealed by the Great Chain of Being. Along this chain, academic minds arranged organisms from the lowest level of perfection to the highest, with God at the top and humans “a little lower than the angels,” according to Alexander Pope. The Great Chain of Being was thought to reflect the divine ordering of entities and to have been set down by the hand of God, for all time.