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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 primato-
logy, 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 anim-
als 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 drastic-
ally, 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.”
