Abstract
Stories like Tarzan, King Kong, and Jungle Book inhabit a special place in human folklore and modern popular culture. They speak of heroes and heroines who connected with and lived among real beasts of the fantastic—great apes. To personally communicate with a primate is, of course, the living dream of any primatologist, but perhaps more notoriously so to those who also wear the hat of an evolutionary psychologist. For them, the biology and behaviour, cognition and communication of our closest living relatives—orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos—offers a time machine to go back and observe, learn and understand who exactly our ancestors were. And why, as members of a once-diverse hominid family, only human ancestors walked a path that ultimately led them to become talking apes.
The first published approaches to holding great apes for the scientific study of their language capacities began by intellectual mavericks and explorers in the 19th century. William H. Furness, an American physician, ethnographer, and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society known for his richly tattooed body, raised orangutans and chimpanzees in his home, retelling in his 1916 monograph “Observations on the mentality of chimpanzee and orang-utans” that “On the whole I should say that the orang holds out more promise as a conversationalist than does the chimpanzee: it is more patient, less excitable, and seems to take instruction more kindly.” It would seem a real breakthrough was possible and imminent. By the mid-20th century, efforts to speak with apes started in earnest and various great ape language projects took off across the United States, predominantly with chimpanzees. The masterplan: to raise great apes in home-labs as though they were children and teach them how to speak.
By the 1950s and 1960s, however, it was becoming rapidly clear that the great ape subjects were missing the mark. They were neither talking nor reaching the development milestones of their human infant counterparts in terms of language acquisition. Today these projects are cited as the classic textbook reference of how vocally incompetent great apes are. This is, at any rate, the account of events thus far told from the perspective of the psychologists leading the experiments and frustrated by the inability of great apes to meet and fulfil their benchmarks and theories.
Now, some 50 years later, Robert Ingersoll and Antonina Anna Scarnà bring us a new version of events in Primatology, Ethics and Trauma (Routledge), shining a different new light over old projects—the version and view of the caretakers and keepers who looked after, cleaned and sought to meet the essential needs of the great ape subjects during and outside test sessions.
Unfortunately, real-life stories of feral children, on which Tarzan and Jungle Book are inspired, do not have happy-endings. Cases of lost children who survived over long periods of time among wild animals are truly impressive. However, they come with an unforgiving price: the children’s development. By the time they are rescued, feral children have severe emotional, developmental, cognitive, and social impairments from which they rarely recover, requiring lifelong assistance and rehabilitation. They never acquire language. Ingersoll and Scarnà ring loud the bell in our conscience; the story of feral human children is also the story of the great ape individuals involved in the language projects of the 20th century.
The book has a clear and pungent message. Classic ape language projects “failed to address the emotional needs of the animals,” neglecting the cruelty that had been inflicted on these individuals in the sake of psychological research. Most great ape subjects were captured from the wild, collected as infants after their mother or group had been massacred, and then smuggled, tied, and shipped to Europe and America. This was a trip from which 1 out of 10 apes would survive. At the same time, captive-born subjects were often hand-raised by humans, either rejected by their (wild-born) mothers or forcefully removed from them in their first days of life. The great ape individuals of these projects were deeply traumatised, subjected to abuse, raised in unnatural physical and social environments. Yet, they were trained and tested as if nothing was amiss. Psychologists treated the experiments with these individuals as though results represented what the entire species could and could not do, taking into no account the personalities and ordeals of the individuals being tested.
During the time of inception of these studies, between 1950s and 1980s, there were few to no established husbandry guidelines, and there was no academic precedent in keeping apes in home-labs. Psychologists took up these projects by fascination and intellectual interest, not by demonstrable experience in primate behaviour or animal training and welfare. The effort was effectively comparable to capturing a young wolf cub from the wild and giving her to the care of a person with no dog experience, with the expectation that the cub should behave like a trained champion shepherd dog by the time it was adult. It would be equivalent to expecting that pathologically neglected human infant orphans should score as high as neurotypical children in standardised tests, or that adults with post-traumatic stress disorder should be as competent as other adults in behavioural assessments.
There was also close to no information available about the natural vocal repertoire of great apes in the wild. Scientists operated completely in the dark, ignorant of what the species’ natural communication signals, tendencies, preferences, or predispositions were. It is little surprise that the projects managed to make so little advance on this front. Yet, a few studies did explicitly state that their ape subjects learned how to say approximations of “cup,” “mama,” and “papa.” So, unless chimps in the wild characteristically run across the forest floor screaming badly articulated versions of “cup” and “mama” (fyi, they don’t), these new syllable- and word-like sound combinations are in fact proof of successful vocal learning, upending the bad reputation that great apes gained from these studies as undesirable models to study speech and language evolution.
Ingersoll and Scarnà deconstruct the theoretical and conceptual ideas that informed these projects, which so adamantly stated how great apes “ought” to behave but were blind to the actual inner and outer lives of their subjects. Ultimately, “no matter how scientifically rigorous those studies seemed, they lacked [. . .] validity and did not represent what truly happens when primates communicate.” The authors decompose how Noam Chomsky’s ideas about how language operates inspired great ape language projects in misguided and incoherent ways, issues embodied in the spectacularly problematic Project Nim (named after Noam Chomsky) led by Herbert Terrace at Columbia University—a project that many blame as the reason why great ape language projects stopped receiving federal funding and came to a complete halt.
The book focuses on the Oklahoma Chimpanzee language project based at the University of Oklahoma as a case study for all great ape language projects taking course around the same period across the United States. While the project at Oklahoma focused on teaching American Sign Language to chimpanzees, the rearing conditions described and ethical issues addressed apply equally to projects focusing on other language modalities, such as spoken language and lexigrams, and other great ape species (i.e., bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans).
The book provides the biographical and psychological portrait of each of the main chimpanzees at Oklahoma: the kind of reports that today psychologists would be expected to assess and weigh in before drawing any conclusions about research results. The authors use each chimpanzee individual, their history, and personality, to draw attention to various aspects—motivation, social bonds, parent role models, relationships with caregivers—that need to be considered for highly social and intelligent animals to live healthy and enriching lives. In neglecting these aspects, it is not possible to consider these subjects as representative members of their species. While positive data (things that the great ape subjects managed to learn or do) speak volumes about the behavioural resilience and flexibility of these animals, no conclusions can be drawn from negative data (things that they did not manage to learn or do). The book closes by drawing a post-mortem on the Oklahoma and other great ape language projects, pointing how the wrongs of these studies stand today as hard-learned lessons, but also opportunities to create “a legacy of care.”
Primatology, Ethics and Trauma is told firsthand by the people who continued to care for these great apes for decades after language projects had been discontinued and by those who continued bringing into question and under scrutiny these project’s original conclusions and uncanny logic. It makes it clear that the apparent vocal and verbal failure of the classic great ape language projects were not due to the inaptitude of great apes, but that of their human researchers. Doing so, the book helps making us better scientists by making us better persons. New generations of students and psychologists will stand better changes of unravelling the roots of human nature and the origins of language in great part by simply being more humane.
