(Photo courtesy University of South Alabama)
Human beings guard their intellectual achievements very jealously. For decades, students were taught that so-called “lower animals” were creatures who operated purely by instinct, incapable of abstract thought, complex communication or imagination. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that we actually share many of these traits with other animals. In recent experiments a bonobo named Kanzi seemed to understand the concept of “make-believe,” drinking from a cup filled with imaginary fruit juice, much the way children would at a pretend tea party. Heidi Lyn is the Joan M. Sinnott Chair at the Comparative Cognition and Communication Lab of the Department of Psychology and Marine Science at the University of South Alabama. Heidi joins us now by phone.
Featured image: Kanzi, language-reared male bonobo, converses with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh in 2006 using a portable “keyboard” of arbitrary symbols that Kanzi associates with words.
(Photo by William H. Calvin, PhD, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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