Lucy

This is Radiolab. We have a story with feelings. Today, we've got an emotional one, a good one, a great one from the archives. That explores the line between humans and chimps and then blurs it right out. It's sort of a trio of stories, and it actually starts with a tiny little story.

I did when I was a baby producer. You will hear my voice at the tippy top. It involves a researcher who was working with the great Jane Goodall and did something she wasn't supposed to do. And kept it a secret for a long time. But finally spills it on the air. So anyway, without further ado, here comes the episode, which is called Lucy, from our archives, kicking it off to Jad and Robert.

You're listening to Radiolab from WNYC.

Let's start with an encounter, yes.

Hello, hello, okay, can you hear me? Okay, I can barely hear you.

Okay, so this is a.

Well, our producer, Lulu Miller was calling around trying to find some stories for this hour. Okay, let's see. And she ended up on the phone with a woman named Barbara Smuts. Is that any better?

Yeah, I think that's better. Barbara Smuts is now at the University of Michigan, but years ago she was a field researcher in Tanzania, working with the great Jane Goodall. You know, following chimps at a distance and writing down everything they do and that kind of thing, right, okay?

And when she was in Tanzania, she ran into in Gombe National Park, a particularly young male chimp named Goblin. Will you tell me the story of Goblin? Oh, sure. First of all, what does he look like? Well, he's an adolescent male.

If he stood up, he would come up to quite a bit above my waist and almost immediately he started picking on me. In the sense that, you know, he would walk past me and just kind of jab me casually as he went by. And sometimes he would punch me with a fist. Sometimes he would just kind of whack me with an open hand, or just kind of use his body to just kind of shove at me. As he went past, you know, he'd look at me as he approached and I'd be going, Oh, no. And is that something they would often do with humans, or was this...?

No, no, he was in a phase of life. When a male, as a male, matures, he rises in rank, and before he challenges any other adult male, he rises kind of step by step through the female hierarchy.

He basically intimidates female after female until they give in and acknowledge that he's superior, and then he'll pretty much leave them alone. So he was at the point where he dominated all, but probably two of the adult females, and you and me.

So that's part of it is where Goblin was, and the other part of it is that I'm really small. So as you're out there doing your research, what do you think is going on? Did you think he just, well, I just felt like he was a bully and I was an easy target.

And in the evening, I would say to Jane, Good old, you know, I'd tell her what happened, ask her what to do. And she would say, just ignore him. You know, eventually he'll get bored and he'll stop doing it. Which was, you know, this kind of standard advice, this sort of myth of total scientific objectivity, just ignore it and that it'll go away. But instead, he escalated. I remember one time I was sitting at the top of a hill and he came up behind me and jumped on my back, which forced me to roll down the hill.

And he kind of rolled down with me, you know, we were like this ball rolling down a hill again. I would tell Jane and ask her what to do, and she would always say the same thing, just ignore it. But one day, during the rain, it was the rainy season, so we all carried raincoats with us and when it wasn't raining, we would carry them on our backs. So that it wasn't in the way. And Goblin walked up to me one day and yanked on my raincoat.

And these raincoats, they were like our most valuable possession, the raincoat, so he grabbed it and he was going to run away with it. And so we had this tug of war, so the two of us were standing facing each other, you know, tugging on this raincoat. And then I did something that was not premeditated at all.

I just leaned forward and I punched him as hard as I could in the face. Oh my God. And what did you think like, right after you'd done it? Were you shocked at yourself that I'd never punched anybody before? You know, much less a chimp who? I was supposed to be studying from a distance, so I was shaking. What did he do?

He just collapsed, he, like, turned into a little baby, you know? He collapsed on the ground and started whimpering. And then he looked to Figgin, who was the alpha male at the time, who was sitting nearby. And he was, like Figgin's little sidekick, always kind of hanging out with Figgin and playing up to him.

He ran over to Figgin screaming, like this being just beat up on me, come on, let's get her, and fortunately, Figgin did not take it seriously. I remember he just reached over with this, you know, great big hand. And without even looking at Goblin, he patted him on the head a few times and then went back to whatever he was doing.

Because it could have been really bad if he had taken it seriously.

I did not go back and tell Jane Goodall I had punched Goblin in the nose and I just I didn't tell the story for a long time. Why not? Well, I think, you know, I would have gotten a lot of disapproval, yeah.

Anyway, Goblin never bothered me again.

So here's the reason we played that story. Because here you've got this moment where you've got a scientist, Barbara Smuts, who's, you know, a trained scientist, got scientific rules of objectivity and all that. And she slips.

And for just that moment, she's not really a human, he's not really a chimp. The raincoat is. The only important thing the borders have dropped is really what's happened, yeah.

Now we're used to thinking of borders, you know, between us and the animals as being fixed. And most people would say, this is good. Keep them there, keep us here, keep us separate.

But not in this hour. We're going to meet people who decided to go the other way, people who are trying to live intimately, and I mean, really intimately with big, wild animals. Something you could either call incredibly stupid or our last great hope, because there are so many of us on the planet. So coming up, we've got two stories of radical experiments.

In Sharon, I'm Jad Abumrad, I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab.

OK, story one, This whole show, in a way, began with a conversation with this fellow Charles Siebert. I am an author and a journalist. And he wrote a book called the Washula Woods Accord, which is a great book in which he tells a story, which he told us in the studio as well, about a chimpanzee named Lucy. So let's just start at the beginning.

Who is Lucy? Lucy is a chimpanzee that actually this was found out later, born to a circus entertainer born in their camp. What country are we in? In the U..S? They traveled up and down the East coast.

The May Knoll Chimp arc show something like that. They were very popular in the 40s and 50s, they were wildly popular, apparently. Oh so, this was a mom and pop entertainment operation that would go from town to town in the Middle Atlantic states, exactly.

And so Lucy was born to two of the chimps that performed in this thing. Yeah, and they used to do things like they used to. Stage wrestling matches with human beings, the he-man of the town would come in and challenge the chimp to a wrestling match or something, really.

What would happen, you know, a chimpanzee? an adult chimpanzee, is about five times the strength of a human. And this guy would walk in thinking, You know, I'm going to give this chimp a run for my money. And like, one swipe of this chimp's forearm and the guy would be carried out. It would end so quickly.

And then the house band would go.

He's out of there, OK, so getting back to our story about Lucy. This is a story that begins in 1964. And it's one that Charles would have never heard about had he not bumped into this obscure old memoir long out of print. Yeah, what's the name of the book?

Do you actually have it with you? Yeah, hold on.

It's called Lucy, Growing up Human, a chimpanzee daughter in a psychotherapist family by Maurice K. Tamerlin, Maurice K. Tamerlin. He is the psychotherapist, he's a psychotherapist.

And he's also the dad in this story, and his wife, Jane, who's a social worker, she's the mom now. The thing to know was that, especially for Maurice Tamerlin, this was more than just adopting a baby. Chimp. This was an experiment, yeah.

He wanted to know, given the right upbringing, how human could Lucy become? You know what he says early on in this book? Would she learn to love us and perhaps have other human emotions as well? Would she be well behaved, rebellious, intelligent or stupid? What about sex?

Maurice Tamerlin actually died in 1989.

But these are his words, read by radio host David Garland. Would she mother her offspring? could she learn to talk? How intelligent might she be?

And so how did they get her? He says that he and his wife, Jane, made all the arrangements, went and got the chimp. On the day the infant was born, the mother was anesthetized.

In the early morning of her second day, Jane fed the mother a coca-cola, which had been spiked with fencyclidine, a drug which puts chimpanzees into a deep, pleasant sleep.

And the baby was taken away. Jane named her Lucy and brought her home on a commercial airline, carried in a bassinet, her face covered with a lacy blanket. We were blissfully unaware of the complexities we were creating on the day Lucy came home.

So the baby was a day or two old, just two days old, so it wasn't weaned. No, and that was part of the experiment.

They bottle feed her. Yeah, she quickly learned to hold her own bottle. At two months, her eyes would focus. at three months. She was trying to climb out of her crib to go to people.

And at six months, she was pretty mobile on all four limbs. Memoir goes on. By the time she was about a year old, she was eating at the table with us forks, spoons, knives. She would see us using silverware and immediately do so herself.

She began to dress herself in skirts, she would often grab my hand, pull me to my feet and beg me to chase her. Always looking back to see that daddy was not too far behind.

You know, he really went at this with this sort of full bore earnestness, you know? When he calls her his darling daughter, and I took great pride in my daughter's achievement. He does feel like a real parent to Lucy. She was so responsive to being looked at, held and stroked.

But he's also, make no mistake, treating this as a very intense, cutting edge experiment. The next phase of the experiment, which occupies a good deal of the book, involves one of those talents that we thought used to only be limited to U.S. language. Okay, can you introduce yourself, please?

Okay, my name is Roger Fouts. I'm a professor of psychology and have worked with chimpanzees since 1967. Roger Fouts was called in by Maurice Temerlin to address one of the, you know, crucial questions of the experiment. Could she learn to talk?

Right, and at the time, he was the guy he'd just been part of a team that had proven for the first time that Chimps could use sign language to communicate. So his job with Lucy was to teach her how to sign. And I think I came into her life when she was, as I remember, it was 1970, I think it was four or five.

She was four or five years old. Roger taught her signs for airplane, baby, doll Ball, banana, barrette. Right, Berry, yeah.

Yeah, so I was sort of like the tutor, friend, babysitter that would come over for a few hours each day and spend some time. Just, you know, just playing with Lucy. I would work on signs, we'd read books together or we'd go for walks, and I would chat with her, basically.

And he says that Lucy just sort of picked it all up. It was like a game. She learned some 250 signs. And the big question is, okay. So is it mere mimicry, or are they able to spontaneously create words and put them together in a new, original way? And there's been a lot of anecdotal evidence that, in fact, Lucy did.

Spontaneously create words. In a later session, when shown a piece of watermelon, Lucy tasted it and she called it candy drink, huh? And a radish had gotten quite old.

And one day, you know, she was calling it food and food for, I think, several days of the study. And then she decided to eat this whole radish. And she took a bite, spit it out. I said, Well, what is that? she called it? Cry, hurt, food.

Wow, she would also lie to me, really, Yes, yeah.

Yeah, and lying, we should also say, is another one of those things that people used to think only we do. During one of my sessions, I came in and she had a potty accident that she had been potty trained, but sometimes she didn't always make it to. And I was upset because I was now faced with having to clean it up. And so I said, Whose is that? and she said, Sue.

Who's Sue? Sue was one of one of my students that would come in and spend time with Lucy, too. I said, No, Sue's not here, and finally, she blamed it on Sue, and yeah, said Lucy.

And sorry, and so sue, yes, this is Sue Sue's heavy drum ball.

The grad student of yours who says she didn't actually see that lie take place? Yes, well, I wasn't there. But she told us that when she met Lucy, she was blown away by, well, the incongruity of it all. Like, for instance, every time she would walk in the house, Lucy would just walk casually into the kitchen and search through the cupboard. For the kind of tea she wanted that day. And put some water in a kettle and put it on the stove and make us tea.

Yeah, it became a routine. I'd come in and she would start the tea. It was the casualness with which she did it, the kind of air about it. That. Yes, I'm making tea, and I would like you to have some too, because tea is what we do.

And so the thing to do is to sit down and to casually sip the tea with Lucy. And casually look through the magazines, listen to the radio. And what magazines would she look at? Well, she, she looked at, I think, House and Garden, and, uh, some magazines that had pictures of women and children in them. Whatever the Timberlands had out, wow, Lucy had developed an awareness of our emotions.

If Jane is distressed, Timberland's wife Lucy notices it immediately and attempts to comfort her by putting her arm about her, grooming her, kissing her. If Jane is sick, Lucy would exhibit tender protectiveness toward her, bringing her food, sharing her own food. And as we get to this next part, this is sort of the midpoint of the memoir. It's useful to sort of remember a basic fact of biology.

Speciation happens when you've got one group of creatures that gets divided into two, and then these two groups evolve away from one another. And eventually, they get so far away from each other that they can't have babies, and nature makes sure that they can't have babies by making one species basically undesirable to the other. You look across, you're a baboon, you look across at a chimp and you go, Eh, yeah?

You're only sexually attracted to your own kind, that is essentially what a species is.

Now, this isn't something you're supposed to be able to learn or unlearn, this is just the way it is. Yeah, which brings us to some troubling passages in the book, beginning really on page 105. Can you read it?

Yeah, and we should warn that this next minute and a half contains a sexual reference. One afternoon, around five o'clock, Jane and I were sitting in the living room when we observed this sequence of behavior. Lucy left the living room and went to the kitchen, opened a cabinet and took from it a glass, opened a different cabinet and brought out a bottle of gin.

Gin? Yeah, yeah, she loved gin and tonics. That's actually not the important part.

It's what happens next. She takes her gin, goes back to the living room, sits on the couch.

And there's really no other way to say this. She starts to masturbate. But even that's not the important part. It's actually in the very next moment that a boundary that took approximately six million years to establish dissolves.

Mr Timmerman sees Lucy doing this, and he thinks, Hmm.

This, this is a perfect experimental moment. So he runs off to the mall, buys a copy of Playgirl magazine and brings it back to her. This is full of naked guys, yeah, and Lucy would masturbate to these centerfolds.

I was not a part of that. I was never there when Lucy looked at the porno, but Sue says that she was there, or what happened next. Yes.

I was there when she was introduced to her first adult male chimpanzee. Had Lucy ever seen another chimpanzee before? Never seen another chimpanzee from the moment of birth? Wow, she says. They brought this male chimp in.

To see if Lucy was attracted to chimpanzee males and was she I? Well, the male chimpanzee would sit there with his hand held out toward her, and she was very frightened and she tried to move away. It was then, says Sue, that she realized that, in every way that mattered, Lucy was no longer a chimp.

She was stranded right in between. This great divide that I knew was there between humans and non-humans, and I, I did not know how to negotiate this. There is no category in our language, except a mythical one, for something that's not human and not animal.

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Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad and I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. Today we're listening to a story about Lucy, uh, Lucy, the confused Chimp.

Confused Chimp This is the chimp that's raised as a human, dressed like a human, talks like a human, even, uh, it's actually attracted to humans.

So the thing to understand before we go on in the story, Sis Charles, uh, seabird, is you can do this, and you can do it heartily, and you can get one confused chimp. But at some point, nature reasserts itself, at least in this way as a chimpanzee grows, it becomes very strong, very strong. And that Sis Charles is usually the point where the human owner throws in the towel.

And you know, there are people who, really, who can't have children, who have chimps as their substitute children. And they all have to go through that moment where the chimp gets too big, too strong, too willful, too sexually mature, and they invariably relinquish the chimp. But in Lucy's case, what happened? So in Lucy's case, uh, the Tamarins really hung on way longer than most. Lucy was 10, going on 11..

They had by this time rigged up an entire portion of the house for this very strong, willful animal. You know, behind bars, padded rooms so he could bounce behind bars, so they built a cage inside the house in their house.

Which defeats the entire purpose of the whole thing. That's right, that's right. Was she destroying things? Oh God, she was tearing the house to shreds?

Lucy was into everything she could take a normal living room and turn it into pure chaos in less than five minutes. Just and with company, she would just jump on a guest and start bouncing up and down.

Our friends and relatives began to visit us less frequently. Now that she's grown and is five to seven times stronger than I am, she could tear us apart, literally, it was. It was more and more, uh, challenging and time-consuming and upsetting. To the extent that he and his wife finally said, All right, we can't do this anymore. This is too much experiment over.

The memoir ends with a big fat question What will happen to Lucy?

On the final page, Maurice Temerlin says Well, we know we can't keep her, but we don't. We don't know what to do. The end. I was raised in the romantic tradition and I like books to have happy endings. If they don't have happy endings, they should have tragic endings. I hate books which have no ending like this one.

Hi, uh, hi, is this Janice? Yes, it is. This is Janice Carter.

Not only does she know the ending of the story, she's actually the key player in it. Well, I hope we have a decent conversation because the lines are really terrible. It took us a really long time to find Janice Carter. She lives in a remote part of Gambia in Western Africa. And that'll become relevant in a second.

How did you meet Lucy? I met her. One of my part-time jobs that I had to put myself through grad school was to clean Lucy's cage. That's how I met her. I cleaned up after her. In fact, Janice says she was one of the few people who could actually handle Lucy when she was out of her cage.

Which surprised the Timberlands because she had been quite difficult with previous caretakers. Was that because you were stronger than the predecessor caretakers, or you were cleverer? Well, I think it was probably more timing. I think at the time that I entered Lucy's cage, she was looking for something outside of that sphere of mom and dad.

And I was a friend. In any case, Janice ended up being in Lucy's life at the exact moment when the Timberlands finally decided what they were going to do with Lucy.

It's 1977.

They had just spent a year traveling around the world, looking at different options. Zoos, research labs, chimp, retirement homes, which were these facilities that were springing up to house chimps? Like Lucy, who had been raised by humans or were in the circus. But every place they visited, she says, was just too depressing for them. Too cage-like for this being that they essentially considered their daughter. And so the decision they came to, was that the best way to honor Lucy? The best way to really make her happy was to simply let her go?

In the wild.

And they asked Janice to help them do it. Did you have any idea or any experience of what you were getting yourself into zero? I didn't have a clue.

So after a 22-hour flight, Janice, the Timberlands and Lucy arrive in Dakar, Senegal. I remember arriving really early in the morning and how hot it was, even early in the morning. Compared to Oklahoma, this was just different. Lots of insects, mosquitoes and high, high, high humidity.

After they landed, she says, they piled into a car and made their way to a nature reserve. Which was basically just a bunch of big cages sitting right outside in the jungle. So they get there, coax Lucy into one of these cages, say their goodbyes for the night, and they leave her.

To spend her very first night alone.

Outdoors.

After a few weeks, Maurice and Jane Timberland decided to leave, and the plan was that Janice for just a little while would stay behind.

You know, to help Lucy with the transition, she started to lose her hair and get skin infections. And no, I wasn't happy being there either, I hated it.

How long did you think you would be staying there? Three weeks, three weeks? Wow, it's worth saying that Janice Carter has actually never left.

At the end of those three weeks, there was just no, no way that I could leave Lucy. The weeks turned into months and then into a year. And still, Lucy's stressed out she's not eating, her hair is falling out. It was just way, way....

And by this point, a whole other group of chimps shows up at this nature reserve. These are former captives like Lucy, and they start to deteriorate as well. So Janice decides what she needs to do is change locations, so she takes Lucy and all these other chimps to this abandoned island that she'd found.

It's a long, narrow island, this is in the Gambia River, a mile wide at its widest point, very thick, green forest. And the idea here was that you would release them and they would be able to do whatever in the island. And learn how to climb trees, and learn how to forage, and learn how to establish relationships with each other.

Was that the notion? Yeah, in a nutshell. And you would think that if you gave them freedom, they would just jump for joy. And that's the last chapter of the book, but it's not what happened. She says that when Lucy and the other chimps got to the island and she let them loose, they clung to her.

During the day, she'd walk them around the island and point out to them. Here are the fruits you should be eating. These are the leaves you should be eating. But they weren't interested in any of that stuff, they were actually more interested in her stuff, which is what they were used to. I had human objects and tools that I needed for my own survival and they wanted to use them. Like when I would cook or brush my teeth, or take a bath, or anything that I wanted to do, they wanted to be doing it with me.

Janice figured the only way this was going to work is if she could somehow keep the chimps away from her and her tools. And so here's where she does something really radical. She had run into a couple of British Army officers who were passing through the Gambio on some kind of wilderness training thing. And she somehow convinced them to build her a cage, a giant metal industrial cage, then to fly it over to her island and drop it thunk right in the center. The thing about this cage is that it wasn't for the chimps.

It was for her, You lived in a cage, I lived in a cage. Yes, wow.

And in the beginning, she says, her cage didn't even have a roof. No, in the rainy season, it rained on me. The only thing above her head was this fine wire mesh to keep the chimps out, and then the chimps all wanted to be inside with me.

When I said no, then they would climb on top of the cage and sleep out in the open, on the wire on top, right above me. Every time there was any sound in the night of a hyena or anything, they would immediately squeal and defecate and urinate right on top of me. Oh God. Then I put corrugates on the roof, but then they started dancing on the corrugates. They really liked the sound that it made, so they were all day long busy dancing.

It sounds funny, and it was, at times, it distracted them from seeing chimps, yeah.

After about a year, says Janice, most of the chimps lost interest in her because they couldn't get her tools. She was stuck in a cage. They gave up, they stopped hanging around her, and they just wandered off into the forest and foraged for themselves. But Lucy would stay behind.

She, for obvious reasons, thought that she was different than all the rest of the chimps.

If I came out of the tent to look to see if they were all gone there. She was right there, looking really forlorn at me and using sign language to tell me to come out to be with her. But Janice would sign to Lucy, No Lucy go, Lucy would then sign back, No Janice come, no Lucy go.

No, Janice, come, Lucy go and this went on and on. I tried and I tried, and I tried and I tried, but Lucy wouldn't move.

She would just stand there, waiting for Janice to help her. Sometimes I would stay inside the tent all day long and I would try to ignore her, ignore that. She was there, thinking that if I ignored her, then she'd go off with the others, but that didn't work. And if I did look at her, then she would sign that she was hurt.

She would use the sign for hurt. Meanwhile, she wasn't foraging for herself. She was getting thinner. And I tried everything and really, really knocked myself out trying to do things for her. And I just started to think, maybe she never was going to do it.

And we would argue about it. I ate everything, I was eating ants, I was eating the sticky latex from pigs. I was doing everything that I was finding really nauseating to do. Just so that she would watch me do it and think, wow, if she's doing it, then I'm going to do it too.

And she wouldn't do it, she'd just turn her head away.

And I honestly thought at one point that she would rather starve to death than have to work for her food. I was losing hope. But incredibly, Janice kept at this for years. She'd have to toss Lucy some food, some of hers, just to keep Lucy from starving, but she kept at it.

And then one evening, after a really, really long day, oh, what a drag of a day. Janice and Lucy are walking through the forest and they both stop because they're so beat and crash. And we just we fell asleep on the ground together. When I woke up, Lucy was actually holding my hand and she had a leaf.

She's holding out a leaf. Yes, she reached out and she offered it to me, and then I offered it to her.

And she ate it. It was a miracle, it was an absolute miracle, and after that, says Janice. And actually, from that moment on, Lucy did start to make the effort and go off and be a chimp.

And be a chimp, that's Charles Siebert again. And it was not too long after that that Janice went away, left the island.

Janice says she'd, you know, periodically circle in a boat just to keep an eye on Lucy. But she says she never, not once set foot on that island, at least not for a year.

And then one day she decided to go back. This day is the first day that I went actually on the island. She pulled her boat up to the tip of the island, There was this little clearing and she parked.

And as she did, Lucy and the other chimps who'd heard the boat came out of the forest and into the clearing, and Lucy and her walked toward each other. And I took with me some of Lucy's possessions that had been important to her, like her mirror, and she used to like to draw and book. Just to see how she responded to it and what did she do.

Well, she looked at the thing, she looked at the book, she looked at herself in the mirror, and she signed to herself in the mirror. Then all of a sudden she grabbed me, I mean, really grabbed me. One arm circled all the way around me and she sort of held me really, really tight.

It just really made me breathless and I started crying.

She started to give these soft little pats, and I feel pretty certain what she was saying to me was, It's okay, you know, it's all okay now.

At that moment, somebody in Janice's boat snapped a picture of her and Lucy hugging. It's a picture that Charles Siebert printed in his book. And it's one of those images that when you see it, I don't know why, it just haunts you.

Lucy has her head against Janice's chest, and Janice has her arms around Lucy. It's one of the more fraught moments. You have to just look at the picture. I mean, it sort of made me want to write the book.

Something about the complexity and the invertedness of that picture.

After that, the other chimps had started to go and she wanted to go with them. And she got up. And she didn't turn back to look at me. She just kept walking, she wanted to go with the other chimps and she did.

A year later, Janice went back to visit Lucy again, but when she got there, this time.

Lucy was gone and I went to all the different places looking to see if we could find anything, and we did. We found her the body, she was lying right near the place where Janice's cage had been just a skeleton.

The skull and the body, her hands and her feet were separated from the rest of the skeleton.

How did you know that? That was her body? She had a slit between her front teeth, and she was very long, and there was nobody else missing. And maybe the saddest, strangest thing was that....

We didn't find any signs of her skin or hair. It appeared that Lucy had been skinned and no one knows actually what happened. But because the hands were taken, which poachers do, they thought? One of the conjectures, which makes it really unbelievably tragic, is that they think that Lucy, always the first to approach. Humans just sort of guilelessly approached poachers, not knowing that they were that, and that they just took advantage of their unwitting and over-eager prey.

But that was Lucy's end.

The scenario that I have developed to cope with her death is that a fisherman or someone who? Some local person? That just happened to pull up next to the land and was going to take a break or put a Raffia Palm down or do something. And because she always felt confidence around humans, she probably approached the person, perhaps as she surprised the person, and just on reflexive descent, she was probably shot. I've got no other explanation.

Janice Carter still lives in Gambia, where she now works not just with the chimps, but with the local population to protect the habitat for the chimps.

And Charles Siebert's latest book, which is a really tremendous book, is the Washula Woods Accord. Our sincere thanks to him for turning us on to the Lucy story.

Also, if you go to our website radiolab.

Org. You can see pictures of Lucy and Janice, and also that particular picture that I described of the hug. It's it's just one of those pictures you really just have to see. It's at Radiolab..org.

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Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. Wow, that was a big head. Sorry, I was just I was feeling it.

I was feeling it. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is radiolab. We've been. We shouldn't be laughing because we've been listening to a really, really sad story about a chimp named Lucy, who....

Who was born as a chimp, raised as a human and died in.

Well, under, because she ran into a human that she trusted and probably shouldn't have. Yeah, and so the question that we want to ask now, and we asked this question to Charles Siebert. You know, a guy who wrote a lot about chimps, is, what's the lesson that we should draw from this?

It's a good question. I think what it says, it points back to something I said earlier that. The only option now, and the best way to dignify and honor, like what they are, who they are, they're more than what is. To fence them ourselves off from them in little pockets of their home that we leave alone. That would be coexistence.

Or if you can't do it that way, and there's a very good reason why you couldn't do it that way. Because there are what 6 now, 6.

8 billion people in the world soon to go up to 9 billion, too many of us, too many of us. So what do you do? Well, one thing you might try. I mean, it's kind of a far-out notion, but you could go back to the Lucy experiment, the one we just described.

It ended very badly. Yeah, but this time you do it, how shall I put this? You do it differently?

Test test. There's a place in Iowa where this is kind of happening, kind of. We sent our producers to our dealer to check it out.

So to set things up, what was the name of this place? the Great Ape Trust? although I think the name is kind of in flux, but anyway, the Great Ape Trust? Which is this place in Des Moines, Iowa, where it's kind of like a compound where they keep a very special group of bonobos, is it Bonobos or Bonobos? How do they say it?

I think they say, Bonobos, Hmm, okay, it might be time to start working again. So when I got there. Bill Fields, who's the director of the Place, Director of Scientific research.

That's him, right there I am. Bonobo studies, Bill took me inside and then there's this place where they keep the bonobos. But Bill had to kind of go in there ahead of me and ask cognate ...if they are ready to see me.

Do you want the visitor to come see you? That's kind of cute, okay?

All right, we're going to bring the visitor to see you. And I walk into this room, which is this kind of big concrete room. Here comes Cognate, he'll be coming right through here. The rules are when there are visitors, that the Bonobos are kind of kept behind this fence.

Oh, there's a fence in the room, yeah, and just on the other side of the fence is cognate.

Maybe if he stood completely upright, he'd be a little bit shorter than I am. But he's built and more than that, he's just got this kind of presence.

I mean, he looks at you like directly in the eye. He was standing there with his arms just kind of swinging. His fingers are amazing.

So here's one of the first things that Cognate does when I come in. Like, there's these two, you know? Like a big plastic salad bowl, he would take these two big plastic salad bowls face down on the concrete and put his hands on them and run them.

Around the room.

Round and round circle, and then he just slams himself up against the wire. Wow.

So here's Kanzi's story. Sue, You remember Sue from the last story? Sue's a heavy drum ball. After she worked with Lucy, this is about 30 years ago, she got Kanzi and she raised him from a little bitty...

She would, you know, carry Kanzi around with her all the time, loving him as much as I love my son, she becomes like a mother to Kanzi.

This sounds a little bit like the Lucy thing, but the difference here is that.

With Kanzi, we never wanted to take him away from his mother. Matata. Kanzi also has a bonobo. Mother. Matata was born in the Congo, so she carried the knowledge of the Bonobos culture as best she could across to Kanzi. I was a member of a different species.

I had a different kind of language, a human kind of language. Sue says that the whole idea of the experiment was to create kind of an emotional bond between her and Kanzi. That would fill Kanzi with an an innate desire to understand what I was going to say, to understand how I felt, to want to communicate with me, and so pretty soon Kanzi is using this. They have kind of a special keyboard with these symbols, and you can touch the symbol, and it makes a computer voice as a word.

Egg good Can you find milk?

Really, yeah, chow, wow, and then this is where to me, it just gets....

Kanzi, as he got older, started being able to communicate without the keyboard. She would talk to him and he would talk back. What? I'll give you an example? When I was there, there was one point where we were outside.

We're here, Kanzi, where are you? Like, Kanzi has this outside space, and we're outside too. But he's still fenced in like before. And Bill and Kanzi are having this kind of back and forth. What's out there?

Do you see something?

Kanzi seems to be saying, There's something I want to show you, or there's something you need to see. It's not quite clear what's going on, I don't see it yet, and Bill can't quite figure it out either. So Kanzi takes us then from the tool site over to this other place, where there's out in the yard. There's this big pit that we can't see into because we're behind this fence.

But Kanzi is basically pointing down in the pit, There's something down in the hole, there's something down in the hole. You have to go in to look at that bill, and according to Bill and Sue saying, there's something there.

There's water. How is Kanzi saying this? I mean, well, I mean, to you and me, it would sound like....

I mean, like, I could tell that Kanzi was gesturing at something.

But.

Is it dangerous? Bill and Sue are hearing. Does it live under the mud words?

Has it got teeth?

It's got teeth, it's got big teeth. Do you want us to get rid of it?

Are you scared of it? Not too much, you can handle it well. I can't come in there right now, but I can in a little bit and we'll check it out. We were so interested in this situation.

You're hearing right here, it's cold out here. I'll come and look, I'll come and look like, what is...?

Like, are they really talking? So we decided to call up Bill Fields, Hello, hello, hello, hello, this is Bill.

Hey Bill. So we heard a bit of tape that Soren recorded where you guys were outside and Kanzi was pointing in a hole or something. And it just sounded like you guys are having some kind of real bilingual exchange. I mean, is that really what was happening? Yes, that's what was happening. We have begun to be able to decode his speech.

If you say, Kanzi, what do you want for breakfast? he'll point on the lexigram keyboard. He wanted grapes, onions, tofu. say, Okay, I'm going to go tell everybody we're going to have grapes, onions and tofu.

And he will just respond with right now, like, vocally, yes, what does that sound like? I'm going to see if I can do it.

The first time it happened, says Bill, he was a grad student, and he and Kanzi were outside. I was sitting on a stump and Kanzi was sort of in a field nearby. But at a certain point, he says, Kanzi stopped what he was doing, turned right to Bill. And I'll do my best to reproduce it for you.

He said to me.

Like that, he said what he said, Chase, but it was very hard for him to say it. Don't you just ask yourself, like, really?

Am I sure that's what I heard? Not anymore, I used to. It is such a common occurrence in our lab, and it's not just my experience.

It's my staff's experience, it's Sue's experience. And so what about you? I mean, you were there. Do you buy what he's saying?

Kanzi speaks words.

I still don't know. Yeah, I mean, the science isn't there. But what I do buy is that there's real communication going on and I think it may be like a new kind of communication.

Like, this is something I don't think has happened anywhere else. Bill and Sue have literally created a third culture, a culture that is neither just bonobo or just human. It's something in between, and I think that that culture and those relationships are real now. The weird thing about that is that, with all the great things that come out of that, there are also moments of real confusion.

Like, what? Well, one time we had a principal investigator who was visiting the lab at that time and she was having a very strong disagreement with Dr. Savage Rumbaugh about method. And this really upset Kanzi.

Why was the investigator screaming at Sue? or what was she doing? Why do you call him an investigator? Is this some kind of academic visitor?

Is that what we mean? That's how scientists are referred to. You have the principal investigator, the co-investigator. It's not columbo with a gun packing a gun. This is like just some guy from some college somewhere.

It's a scientific investigator, okay, so just to fill out the scene, you've got Sue, Bill and this investigator in one room. And Kanzi in a different room, behind some glass, very thick, clear glass, so Kanzi can actually see what's happening in their room.

He can see that this investigator is getting angry with Sue, his human mom, getting more and more animated. It was professionally aggressive and loud. And what was the argument about? Do you remember? Oh, yes.

It was about the format that we were going to use for archive video, that's it.

Well, you know, wars have been fought over stupid things.

And as Sue and this lady are arguing, what was Kanzi doing? He was banging on the window, so I went to speak to him. He walked into Kanzi's room, Kanzi then went to the keyboard and told him. You have to punish that investigator for screaming at Sue.

He wanted me to go in there and stop her from doing this. It was my responsibility to take care of things and that if I didn't do it, he was going to bite me. So you're being told, man up, this woman is being attacked and you're supposed to pound or bite that investigator, you don't bite her.

I will bite you. Is that essentially yes? And I defaulted to human culture? I said, Kanzi, I really can't go argue.

I can't interfere, I just defaulted to the way things would happen in the human world. And so later. I told Sue that Kanzi told me he was going to bite me, and Sue said, Kanzi's not going to bite you. And 24 hours later after, he threatened to bite me.

He says Sue was putting Kanzi back in his enclosure, but Kanzi pushed past her, ran down the hall, found Bill in his office. He came and found me and he bit me, He bit you. Where did he bite you?

On the hand, it was really serious. I lost a finger. What happened was the hand was bitten and they had to reattach all of the ligaments so that the rest of my hand would work. I had three surgeries that week.

The first one was 14 hours, the next one was about eight hours, and the third one was about three hours. But the problem was, I apparently had sensitivities to drugs we didn't know about, and they had given me morphine and I arrested. It, stopped my breathing and my heart.

You almost died, yes.

Wow, would you think if you'd bitten her, then he wouldn't have bitten you? I'm certain of it. Yes, yeah.

So what did you do then? I mean, did you just come back to the lab and then nothing happened? I came back to the lab about 14 days after the event. I was not ready to, but I didn't know what else to do.

But for eight months, I didn't speak to Kanzi and he kept trying to make up with me. How would he do that, would he type in his keyboard? Sorry, he refused to tell me he was sorry, but he would keep calling me. Bill says he'd use the keyboard to ask the other researchers to get bill.

Get bill. And what he wanted me to do is just come down and renew my friendship with him and just act like nothing had happened. And I simply wouldn't go and see him. And Sue came to me and tried to talk me into going to see him. And I said, When Kanzi's ready to apologize, but she'd come back and say, No, Kanzi's not going to apologize.

He doesn't think he should, and I just stood on my ground. You know, Kanzi's going to apologize to me. Finally, one afternoon, eight months later, one of his colleagues came up to him and told him, Kanzi wants to tell you he's sorry.

And as soon as I got down there, he threw his body up against the wire, pressing up against me. And he just screamed and screamed in my mouth, which was this very submissive scream. It was very clear he was sorry and he was trying to make up with me. And I asked him on the keyboard, Are you sorry? and he told me, Yes.

And when you say he threw himself against the wire, that means against the separating device between you and him. Yes, he just pressed his body up against that wire and so I put my body up against him and we just pressed up against each other. Do you see what's happening here?

You're telling us a story which reads more and more and more like a soap opera between a community of beings. The fact that one of them is a little bonobo and the other one is a guy is almost incidental to the story. It's like, I could put this on Channel 5 if I wanted. It's just primates. We are all the same, really.

Just primates. I am all alone now, plain old human being.

Currently, the Great Ape Trust is not just Kanzi. There's about seven different bonobos there and a dozen or so staff and researchers. And while they're certainly not the same, they have created at the very least some middle ground.

And for Sue, that's not about a solution to any conservation problem or some scientific breakthrough, it's something deeper and more personal. When I am with Bonobos, I feel like I have something that I shared with them long ago, but I forgot. As we've clothed ourselves and separated ourselves, we've gained a wonderful society, but we've lost a kind of soul-to-soul connection that they maintain.

And it sometimes seems to me as though we're both a kind of a disadvantaged species. They have things that I've lost, I have things that they don't have. I feel like if I could have their abilities and keep mine, I would be whole.

Transcribed by https://otter.

AI.

Thanks for listening.

Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.

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