Word: bonobos
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...animal has done more to renew interest in animal intelligence than a beguiling, bilingual bonobo named Kanzi, who has the grammatical abilities of a 2 1/2-year-old child and a taste for movies about cavemen. The 12-year-old pygmy chimpanzee lives with a colony of other apes in a cage complex on the wooded campus of the Georgia State University Language Research Center, near Atlanta. Under the tutelage of psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, he makes his desires known either by pointing to symbols printed on a laminated board or by punching the symbols on a special keyboard that then generates...
Through most of the experiment, Kanzi and Alia were neck and neck. At the end, however, Alia's language skills began to outpace the bonobo's, while Kanzi's grammatical comprehension topped out at the level of a 2 1/2-year-old. Though not impressive by human standards, even that toddler level implies vastly more sophisticated abilities than critics have acknowledged...
...instance, a one-way mirror prevented Kanzi and Alia from seeing who gave them commands, while those tracking what the ape and toddler did in response wore earphones to prevent them from hearing the requests. Each sentence was also utterly new to both ape and child. The young bonobo has thus helped break a two-decade deadlock during which language experimentation with animals was paralyzed by concerns that the animals were responding to cues from their trainers rather than demonstrating true abstract abilities...
This is not typical ape behavior. In similar situations, the bonobo's cousin, the common chimpanzee, might engage in greetings and dominance interactions with far less libido in evidence. Why then do the bonobos launch into extended orgies of polymorphous perversity...
...feature of the bonobo's forest environment offers a possible clue: fruit trees that produce an unusual abundance of food in a small area. This brings large numbers of bonobos into closer social contact than is typical for common chimpanzees. The presence of food can stimulate competition among the apes, and the larger the group the greater the danger of conflict. Frances White of Duke University argues that at these crucial times, sexual encounters reinforce bonds, particularly among females, helping individual apes to maintain access to food. Frans de Waal, the author of Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes...