Bonobos

Savage-Rumbaugh appeared at the door in a denim button-down shirt and pink jeans, her socked feet tucked into slippers. She led me into the makeshift office she’d set up in the center of the house. In lieu of walls, she had dragged a bookcase between her desk and the stone fireplace that opened out into the living room. The shelves were overflowing. “It was in this house that I decided to go back to school and make a career of psychology,” she said. “I have a clear memory of standing in front of that fireplace and thinking that if I could just publish one article in my lifetime, it would be worth the effort and the money and that I would have made a contribution to science and not let my mind go to waste.”

She was not feeling hopeful these days, she said. Energized by a conference at MIT where she’d presented on interspecies communication, she had recently sent a proposal to collaborate with Taglialatela, but he hadn’t accepted it. She hadn’t seen the bonobos in five years. Meanwhile, the rainforests in the Congo River Basin that are home to most of the remaining 20,000 wild bonobos are being torched by palm oil companies to clear the ground for plantations. Demand for the product, which is used in half of all packaged food items in American supermarkets, from pizza dough to ramen noodles, is skyrocketing. Bonobos, already threatened by poachers and loggers, are suffocating in the fires.

I glanced at a roll of heavy-duty paper tilted against Savage-Rumbaugh’s desk: a copy of the lexigrams. Following my gaze, she pulled it out and unscrolled it on the shag rug, placing three stone coasters around the edges. The lexigram symbol for “Sue” hovered in the upper left-hand corner: a green keyhole with two squiggles shooting out from either side.

“My mother never understood why I did what I did with apes,” she said. “She thought it was strange. Then something happened in the last few weeks before she passed away. She was having so much trouble understanding me, so I stopped speaking to her. Instead, I started writing and painting to get my messages across. It was like a door opened, and all that I actually was flowed into her understanding, and she smiled. And some heavy load lifted.”

In losing spoken language, and falling back on a nonverbal way of communicating, had Savage-Rumbaugh’s mother become any less human? I was reminded of something Savage-Rumbaugh had once said to me about our species’ signature desire: “Our relationship to nonhuman apes is a complex thing,” she’d said. “We define humanness mostly by what other beings, typically apes, are not. So we’ve always thought apes were not this, not this, not this. We are special. And it’s kind of a need humans have—to feel like we are special.” She went on, “Science has challenged that. With Darwinian theory, this idea that we were special because God created us specially had to be put aside. And so language became, in a way, the replacement for religion. We’re special because we have this ability to speak, and we can create these imagined worlds. So linguists and other scientists put these protective boundaries around language, because we as a species feel this need to be unique. And I’m not opposed to that. I just happened to find out it wasn’t true.”