Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind

1

On a Beach in Portugal

Threading my way along the sandy path toward the ocean shore, I sought out the rhythmic sound of shifting surf. The faint light of predawn arrived and I could see the rocky coastline ahead, then the silhouette of the distant mountains behind which the sun would soon rise. I was near the small coastal village of Cascais, Portugal, attending a meeting organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, a group lengendary in anthropological circles.

Scientists invited to Wenner-Gren conferences are kept away from the rest of the world and encouraged to examine each other’s views in small and intense conferences. Until recently, such conferences had always taken place at The Castle, in Burg Wartenstein, Austria. But times being as they were, even the Wenner-Gren Foundation could no longer afford the luxury of a castle and its attendant staff, solely for the purpose of getting scientists to talk meaningfully to one another.

Having forfeited its beloved castle, the foundation located a small hotel near Cascais, not least because the hotel, though relatively new, was constructed as a castle. Ancient stone had been formed into thick heavy walls with arched windows, enclosing restful courtyards. This modern bastion was poised high on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. The setting rivaled that of the original castle—especially in its isolation.

Early morning is the time I try to bring order to the flood of thoughts running through my mind upon waking. Once the bustle of the day begins, I must constantly be prepared to respond to others and usually have little or no time to reflect. Thus I find it best to try to seek a bit of solitude before the day arrives, when I can. Walking along the beach at Cascais, I mused over the discussions of the past few days. Bill Calvin, a neurobiologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, had been talking about the extraordinary accuracy and power with which humans can throw. Chimpanzees and gorillas can throw, too, as visitors to zoos sometimes discover, to their chagrin. Apes do not enjoy being stared at and frequently throw things at visitors in an attempt to make them leave.

Calvin was among the most thoughtful of the scientists gathered about the round table overlooking the ocean where we spent most of our daylight hours. Unlike others who could not wait to disagree, Calvin took in information and permitted it to interact with the vast pool of knowledge he already had stored. Only when some new insight arrived as a result of this process did Calvin wade into the constant fray that was taking place around the table. He, more than the rest of us, knew how brains worked, and he was very good at letting his own brain have the room it needed to do its job. It took a while to realize this, but when I did, I made certain to listen carefully whenever Bill Calvin decided to speak.

The development of throwing, Calvin had pointed out, was clearly important during man’s evolution from an apelike ancestor. In particular, the accurate hurtling of stones became a valuable means of hunting and self-defense against predators. Another scientist, Nick Toth, was also interested in throwing, but for a different reason. Nick, unlike the rest of us, actually knew how to make the stone tools that our prehuman ancestors had utilized.

Nick was not a typical scientist. I recognized this right away when he sat down with his briefcase and began pulling fist-sized rocks out of it. He then casually mentioned that the most monumental decision of his life had been whether to be a rock musician or an anthropologist. Interesting dilemma, I thought, the only commonality being that both professions focused on rock.

The previous day, Toth had riveted the group’s attentions with his display of stones and demonstrations of how rocks can become tools. He explained the physics of conchoidal fracture, by which good, sharp flakes can be made, and he challenged us to accompany him to the beach to try to make the crude stone tools of our two-million-year-old ancestors, Homo erectus. That afternoon I gained a newfound respect for the feats of my prehuman ancestors. No longer did I deem it appropriate to apply the word crude to their tools.

It was my first attempt to emulate a Paleolithic stone knapper, and I did not find it an easy task. Neither I, nor most of the other educated scientists, could coax even a single flake from the pebbles on the beach during our first half hour of trying. We even resorted to placing one stone on the ground and slamming another against it, but to no avail. Finally, instead of just watching Nick, I began to look closely at what he was doing. Why did the stones break so easily when he struck them together with such little force, while they just made a loud thud when I slammed them together as hard as I could?

I finally recognized that Nick was not really hitting rocks together; instead, he was throwing the rock in his right hand against the edge of the rock in his left hand, letting the force of the controlled throw knock off the flake. The hammer rock never really left his right hand, but it was nonetheless thrown, as a missile, against the core, or the rock held in place in his left hand. What had I been doing? Just slamming two rocks together as though I were clapping my hands with rocks in between.

Once I realized how Nick was actually flaking stone, I grasped the profound similarity between the activities of throwing and stone knapping. In each activity, you must be able to snap the wrist rapidly forward at just the right moment during the downward motion of the forearm. This wrist-cocking action produces great force, either for achieving distance in throwing or for knocking a flake off a core pebble. I also knew that the wrist anatomy of African apes prevented them from making this kind of movement. Chimpanzees’ wrists stiffened as they became adept knuckle walkers. They cannot bend their hands backward at the wrist as we can, but they can put weight on their hands for long periods without injury to their wrists.

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.

From our modern perspective, the chain appears neither great nor accurate. Not surprisingly, the chain embodied an explicitly racist view of modern humans. Ascending the line of gradation, we come at last to the white European; who being most removed from the brute creation, may, on that account, be considered as the most beautiful of the human race, said Charles White, a British physician, in 1799.¹ White’s clearly self-serving view was commonly held among scholars at the time and persisted well into the twentieth century.

Although European scholars were confident about the exalted place of white races in the Great Chain of Being, there was a problem. According to the theory, the chain should be physically continuous, with no gaps. But gaps there were: namely, between minerals and plants, between plants and animals, and, most embarrassingly of all, between humans and animals. That is, there appeared to be no half-animal half-human beast to fill the gap between ourselves and the other creatures of God’s planet.

So pressing was the need to fill this gap that in 1758, when Carolus Linnaeus established the basis of zoological classification with his Systema Naturae, he postulated the existence of a primitive form of human, Homo troglodytes, to fill the chasm. Explorations of Africa and other distant lands were beginning at this time, and tales of apes and primitive tribes filtered back to the scientific establishment. With only the flimsiest information to go on, scholars constructed descriptions of apes that were half-human and half-ape. Scientific illustrations of the time captured these conceptions, revealing more about the mind of the artist and the perceptions of the time than about the anatomy of the creatures they supposedly depicted. Thus was the physical gap between humans and the rest of nature effectively closed, as demanded by the Great Chain of Being.

Despite the physical continuity among living forms that this sleight of mind achieved, it must be noted that Western tradition continued to hold humans distinct. From Plato to Aristotle to the Christian era, man set himself apart from the rest of the living world by virtue of being the single possessor of a rational soul, as embodied in the gift of speech. Physical continuity between man and other creatures was tolerated, but when it came to the realm of the mind, popular belief of the time held that the Great Chain had been irrevocably disjoined by a God who created man in his own image and then gave him dominion over all the beasts.

This conceit of mind-body disunion, passed down through the generations, imbued otherwise scholarly scientific efforts with a peculiarly myopic perspective as regards the mind. Veneration of the human soul became transformed into veneration of the human mind, the human brain, and all the products thereof: language, rational thought, music, art, and culture.

With the appearance of Darwin’s The Origins of the Species in 1859, this view began to shift a little. It became necessary to view the Great Chain of Being as alterable, not static and set for all time by the hand of a divine creator. Evolutionary theory revealed a dynamic image of historical change, of descent with modification, as Darwin put it.

To scientists of the day, the evolution of Homo sapiens became a virtual inevitability, a manifest destiny of gradation of form and function from ape to man that had to occur on the way to the production of the pinnacle of the natural world, the mind of man. Whether or not half-man half-ape creatures currently existed was irrelevant, for they surely existed in the relatively recent past. It was assumed that ancestral protohumans became more technological and more intelligent through time and that they were predestined to hold sway over all the earth. European man assumed that at some dim point in the past, the human mind had emerged into the light of awareness, forever distancing man from his younger brother, the African ape.

Thus, although evolutionary theory offered a view of the Great Chain of Being as under continual construction, the theory itself became transformed to support the separatist view that the minds of men and animals were distinctly different. Along with this view traveled the equally self-serving perspective that evolutionary theory explained why some races had made more technological progress than others. For example, it was believed that European man had simply evolved higher in the evolutionary scale; non-European races were thought to be in a state of transition and therefore intellectually inferior.

Thus was evolutionary theory used, as are all scientific theories, to support the biases of the society that gave it birth. Both racism and speciesism were justified. For instance, Roy Chapman Andrews, a leading figure at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, wrote in 1948: The progress of the different races was unequal. Some developed into masters of the world at an incredible speed. But the Tasmanians, who became extinct about 1870, and the existing Australian aborigines lagged far behind . . . not much advanced beyond the stages of Neanderthal man.²

Lest Andrews be perceived as peculiarly pompous, all one needed to do was attend the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. There, various races of people were on display as an illustration of the evolutionary stages of human beings from primitive man to white European society. According to Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, authors of Ota Benga, a book about anthropological fashions, the eminent anthropologist Chief McGee, the director of the anthropology section, dispatched special agents of the fair to the four corners of the earth to assemble representatives of all the world’s races, ranging from the smallest pygmies to the most gigantic peoples, from the darkest blacks to the dominant whites.³ Anthropology wanted to start with the lowest known culture, and work its way up to man’s highest culture symbolized by the exposition itself. Bradford and Blume write that

McGee regretted that it was impossible to exhibit examples of all the world’s peoples on the Exposition grounds. The Anthropology Department had to settle for being less definitive than Carl Hegenbeck’s Circus, also featured at the fair, with its largest representation of an animal paradise ever constructed.⁴

The human pygmies were kept in an enclosure and not permitted to roam the compound at will. They were fed very little and clothed not at all, for it was believed that they neither required nor cared for these amenities in their current state. The chimpanzees and monkeys on exhibit were housed with these people, as it was thought that since the pygmies were closer on the evolutionary ladder to such creatures than to Europeans, they could communicate with them more effectively.

According to the Scala Natura of the time, such individuals were viewed as genetically inferior, capable only of concrete, not abstract, thought. These people existed only in hunter-gatherer societies, it was said, because they had not evolved sufficiently to comprehend, much less create, the complex systems of laws and monetary exchange that characterized the modern human societies of northern climates.

Even though his theory was employed to justify such disreputable ends, Darwin himself posited no sharp watershed between man and ape, or between races of man. Indeed, Darwin recognized that the greatest potential contribution of evolutionary ideas regarding the Scala Natura could be to help man understand himself through the study of the behavior of his living kin, especially his younger brother in evolutionary time—the ape.

In a widely unread but penetrating book, The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man, Darwin made a spectacular first attempt at tackling the study of the continuity of the expression of emotion. He saw most, if not all, of our human emotions as extant, both physiologically and psychologically, in other mammals to some degree, and he attempted to trace the transformation of these expressions of emotion across a number of species.⁵ His work in this area was careful and grounded to the greatest possible extent in the available knowledge of muscular function and anatomy.

However, unlike the physical samples that he collected for The Origin of the Species, examples of behavior were impossible to collect and contrast, since at that time there was no way to record actions on videotape; even photographs were difficult to make and reproduce. Moreover, travel being what it was at the time, one could not observe most animals under natural circumstances in the field. For these reasons Darwin requested and relied on the accounts of a variety of other parties who had witnessed examples of communication in animals and who recognized similarities between the communicative behaviors of animals and those of man.

Darwin recognized the shortcomings of such accounts and took considerable pains to focus on directly observable behaviors and to seek out reports from multiple parties. When he noted disagreements, he attempted to verify observations for himself. For example, when he found reports of tears in monkeys as an expression of emotion similar to grief, he attempted to observe this phenomenon for himself; he could not verify it.

Whereas Darwin, in 1872, focused on the continuity of the expression of emotion, Georges Romanes set out in 1886 to expand the area of behavioral continuity between man and animal by including mind and intellect. Taking Darwin’s work on the continuity of emotion as a starting point, Romanes observed:

The expression of fear or affection by a dog involves quite as distinctive and complex a series of neuro-muscular actions as does the expression of similar emotions by a human being: and therefore, if the evidence of corresponding mental states is held to be inadequate [for the existence of mind] in the one case, it must in consistency be held similarly inadequate in the other. And likewise, of course, with all other exhibitions of mental life.⁶

Starting with mollusk, then working his way through ants, bees, wasps, termites, spiders, scorpions, fish, reptiles, birds, marsupials, bison, horses, rodents, bats, seals, beavers, elephants, cats, dogs, monkeys, and apes, Romanes took on the much too monumental task of attempting to assess the degree to which each possessed the powers of reason. Like Darwin, he had to rely on the observations of others and, like Darwin, he took pains to attempt to cross-validate these observations. Many were undoubtedly valid. For example, as foxes became familiar with traps, they could no longer be caught; consequently, trappers were often forced to seek new methods, a sort of natural experiment in a sense, though one that certainly would not pass the shield of an IACUC (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) in this day and time.

Romanes reports the account of one trapper who accordingly

set a kind of trap with which the foxes in that part of the country were not acquainted. This consisted of a loaded gun set upon a stand pointing at the bait, so that when the fox seized the bait he discharged the gun and thus committed suicide. In this arrangement the gun was separated from the bait by a distance of about 30 yards, and the string which connected the trigger with the bait was concealed throughout nearly its whole distance in the snow. The gun-trap thus set was successful in killing one fox, but never in killing a second; for the foxes afterwards adapted either of two devices whereby to secure the bait without injuring themselves. One of the devices was to bite through the string at its exposed part near the trigger, and the other device was to burrow up to the bait through the snow at right angles to the line of fire.⁷

Unfortunately, observations such as these never resulted in further serious scientific study, which was an intellectual tragedy, for it placed the real impact of evolutionary thought outside our collective awareness. There were two reasons for this sad state of affairs. First, some of the sources Romanes depended on proved unreliable. Some reports were made by people unfamiliar with the general habits of the animals they observed, and behaviors that were attributed to reason were later shown not to require causal understanding. Second, the few psychologists who did undertake the experimental study of these issues did not fully grasp the nature of the problem they were studying.

The most famous example of such work was that by Edward Thorndike, who placed a cat in a puzzle box and carefully watched how it learned to unlatch the handle and escape. He found that it was only by accident, not by power of reason, that the cat became able to unhinge the door. He quickly concluded that most other expressions of animal intelligence were similarly the result of trial and error learning. In this example, locking a cat in a box is certain to result in a great many attempts to paw at the door, and some of these attempts are likely to be successful without intent. The cat then simply repeats them once their success is demonstrated.

What Thorndike did