![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() After a strained email exchange that continued for several days, the chair of the facility’s board finally told her that she could no longer stay at the Trust. In November 2013, eight years after she opened the Trust, and having made plans for a phased retirement, Savage-Rumbaugh returned to Des Moines from a medical absence to care for Teco, Kanzi’s 3-year-old nephew, who had injured his leg. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh was among the first psychologists to study bonobo cognition for more than three decades, she was immersed within one group. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Her research had “punched holes in the wall separating” humans from apes, he wrote-a wall built upon the longstanding scientific consensus that language was humanity’s unique and distinguishing gift. None other than Frans de Waal, the world’s pre-eminent primatologist, lauded her unique experiment. In 2011, Time magazine named Savage-Rumbaugh one of the world’s 100 most influential people on the basis of her work with Kanzi and his family. Kanzi’s aptitude for understanding spoken English and for communicating with humans using the lexigrams had shown that our hominid kin were far more sophisticated than most people had dared to imagine.īy the time Kanzi arrived at the Great Ape Trust that day in 2005, his name had appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Her relationship with a bonobo named Kanzi, in particular, had made the pair something of a legend. Savage-Rumbaugh’s seven books and close to 170 articles about their cognitive abilities played a significant role in introducing them to the wider world. It consisted of more than 300 “lexigrams” corresponding to English words-a lingua franca that Savage-Rumbaugh had developed over many years to enable the bonobos to communicate with human beings.īefore Savage-Rumbaugh began her research, the bonobo, an endangered cousin of the chimpanzee, was little known outside the Congo River Basin. But the center’s signature feature was the keyboard of pictorial symbols accessible on computerized touchscreens and packets placed in every room and even printed on researchers’ T-shirts. A monitor connected to a camera outside allowed the bonobos to screen human visitors who rang the doorbell pressing a button, they granted or denied visitors access to a viewing area secured by laminated glass. Every feature of the facility was designed to encourage the apes’ agency: They could help prepare food in a specialized kitchen, press the buttons of a vending machine for snacks, and select DVDs to watch on a television. There was a music room with drums and a keyboard, chalk for drawing, an indoor waterfall, and a sun-washed greenhouse stocked with bananas and sugar cane. Instead of in conventional cages, the apes, who ranged in age from 4 to 35, lived in rooms, linked by elevated walkways and hydraulic doors they could open themselves. The $10 million, 18-room compound, known then as the Great Ape Trust, bore little resemblance to a traditional research center. When the back door swung open, out climbed Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, her sister and collaborator Liz Pugh, a man named William Fields, and three bonobo apes, who were joining a group of five bonobos who had recently arrived at the facility. Sunlight glanced off the western tower, scrunching the faces pressed to the windows of the bus. Two glass towers loomed over the 13,000-square-foot laboratory, framed on three sides by a glittering blue lake. Passing beneath a tunnel of cottonwood trees listing in the wind, it rumbled past a life-size sculpture of an elephant before pulling up beside a new building. One spring day in 2005, a yellow school bus carrying six passengers turned onto a freshly paved driveway seven miles southeast of downtown Des Moines, Iowa. ![]()
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