Monkey See, Monkey Do....

Great Apes Trust is a science center dedicated to studying the intelligence and behavior or great apes. Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, joined the Great Apes trust in 2005, she's the executive director of the center has dedicated her time to teaching apes how to communicate. She has taught these animals how to complete computer tasks, use symbols, type on keyboards, decode structures and learn concepts of quantity and numbers. Who said we didn't evolve from the same ancestors as apes?  Savage - Rumbaugh asked the question, "What is a bonobo?" She then asked the question, "What is a human?" Her journey began with those two simple questions to discover the difference or if there is a difference between how an ape learns and communicates to how a human learns and communicates. In her mind there isn't much of a difference, but for apes it may be a little harder and take a little longer. Overall a young ape learns like that of a human child. The first question I would ask her would have to be, Do you believe we evolved from the same ancestors as apes? 




Sue Savage - Rumbaugh first success story was an ape named Kanzi.

My sources that I found most valuable and reliable were:


1. Great Apes Trust - This is the centers main site hosting a lot of videos of apes doing some amazing things as well as discussing more of what they do and how they do it. They introduce the scientists teaching the apes how to communicate similar to the way humans do.


2. Time Magazine - I found Time magazine to be another valuable source because Savage-Rumbaugh was named by them one of the world's 100 top most influential people. The article discusses in more detail about Kanzi, then a 29 year old male ape, and a little of Savage-Rambaugh's work with him.


3. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (1993) - Some of her work on Language Comprehension in Ape and Child was published in this journal. Kanzi was the first ape to learn in the same manner as children do. By reading  her work in great detail I learned the tools used to teach specifically Kanzi, but other apes that followed as well. 


4. The My Hero Project - This site gives statistics on bonobos, considered to be one of the most intelligent apes of all. They are considered to be our closest living relatives. The site tells the story of just how Savage - Rumbaugh came across Kanzi and her quest to discover his and other apes intelligence.


5. On the Human - a project of the National Humanities Center. Because she believes humans and apes learn similarly, Savage - Rumbaugh does a forum on human language and human consciousness, comparing and contrasting learning capabilities and how human infants and ape infants develop.

Sue Savage - Rumbaugh

“We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.” 

― E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind