Titel:
Kanzi
Ondertitel:
The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind
Auteur:
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Roger Lewin
ISBN/ASIN:
047115959X
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Extract from Kanzi (Cover)
I was hesitant to believe what I knew I was seeing. Not only was Kanzi using the keyboard as a means of communicating, he also knew what the symbols meant - in spite of the fact that his mother had never learned them. For example, one of the first things he did that morning was to activate ‘apple’, then ‘chase’. He then picked up an apple, looked at me, and ran away with a play grin on his face. Several times he hit food keys, and when I took him to the refrigerator, he selected those foods he’d indicated on the keyboard. Kanzi was using specific lexigrams to request and name items, and to announce his intention - all important symbol skills that we had not recognized that Kanzi possessed.
Cover
This is the story of a male bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee, called Kanzi. His familiy of bonobos has been studied by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh since 1975, when the matriarch, Matata, first arrived in the United States by special arrangement with the Zairian government. This is Kanzi’s oddyssey, shared by the scientist who helped his natural mother raise him. Together, they have demolished accepted ideas about the uniqueness of Homo sapiens, particularly concerning human language and consciousness.
As an infant, Kanzi revealed that he could learn language in the same way that a human child does: while playing alongside his mother when she was being taught words and symbols, he picked them up naturally. He is now able to understand and respond to complex spoken English sentences - a breakthrough in the controversial area of ape-language studies.He is also able to produce simple two- and three-word sentences, using symbols located on a computer keyboard.
Kanzi has even invented some grammatical rules of his own which reflect bonobo ways of doing things. There is no quesion that in Kanzi’s brain, one-third the size of a modern human brain, the capacity for language comprehension and production exists. The implications for the nature of the human ancestral mind, of two to three million years ago, are stunning. Kanzi is an exciting, groundbreaking book in which we not only share an important and controversial scientific discovery, but also enjoy the heartwarming study of the extraordinary relationship of mutual respect that, through language, became possible between a human and an ape.