The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen Page A

talk.
    Robert Shumaker, vice president of conservation and life sciences at the Indianapolis Zoo, told me that there have been several studies aimed at getting monkeys and other primates to speak English. Vicky, a chimpanzee raised by scientists in the early 1900s, was trained to vocalize breathy imitations of“Mama,” “Papa,” “cup,” and “up,” but the efforts were laborious and the lessons soon forgotten. Great apes simply don’t have the morphology to form English words. However, Bonnie, an orangutan that Shumaker worked with at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, demonstrated a series of whistles that she used to let caretakers know her needs. “And she did this without training,essentially creating her own vocabulary and syntax to go with it,” says Shumaker.
    Experiments at the think tank at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, DC, display this innate ability. Chikako Suda-King, on a postdoc fellowship with the David Bohnett Foundation at the Smithsonian, took me behind the scenes one autumn day to meet the famous Brainy Bonnie, the orangutan that Shumaker had worked with. When Suda-King walked into the cage area, Bonnie started to act like an excited kid, but soon grew serious when she saw Suda-King roll a computer up in front of her cage. She promptly settled down in front of her computer screen.
    Suda-King was trying to determineif Bonnie had the ability to make decisions based on the perception of her own knowledge of a given subject. In other words, was she capable of asking herself: Do I know enough to take this test? This is a level of self-awareness that was previously thought unique to humans. On this day Suda-King presented five pictures, all of the same thing, which the orangutan individually tapped to move forward in the game. The next screen gave Bonnie a choice of two pictures presenting options that she had learned to translate as follows: Do you want to go to a second test of your recall of those photos and get three grapes, or do you want to opt out of the test and take only one grape? If the animal chose to take the test and missed, she got nothing. During the test phase, she was shown several photos; only one was similar to those in the study phase.
    Bonnie picked the test over and over, and consistently matched the correct photos. Suda-King, who holds a PhD in animal psychology, had to slip Bonnie her three-grape rewards through a slot between them, and today Suda-King was having trouble keeping up with the orangutan. “We’re going to have to make this test harder for her,” she joked, though she admitted it had actually taken Bonnie a couple of years to figure the test out. Still, it proved self-awareness in a primate.
    Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a research scientist at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, claims her bonobos, relatives of chimpanzees,are able to communicate with caregivers through humansign language and a system of lexicons. Savage-Rumbaugh says her bonobos are allowed to watch soap operas, which they select and turn on themselves, and they have shown a preference for sequential stories.
    Lisa Heimbauer, a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, taught a chimpanzee called Panzee to understand English by treating the chimp like a human from shortly after it was born. Panzee can currently understand 130 human words even when those words are offered in computer-distorted speech that was thought to disguise those words from anyone other than humans. Heimbauer believes that primates developed understanding before speaking. “Thecognitive abilities to perceive speech had to be there when production evolved,” she told me in a telephone interview.

    Though both Neanderthals and Homo erectus are thought to have had some form of basic speech, Homo sapiens were better at acquiring and advancing it. This gave them a dramatic advantage over other hominids because they could engage in trade while learning to navigate the wildly fluctuating climate of