Tilly Norwood, AI Actress

 

[Tilly Norwood is a fictional, photorealistic, 100% AI-generated “actress” whose September 2025 announcement caused controversy in the film industry.  She’s not a real person, but created by Xicoia (pronounced she-KOY-uh), the AI talent studio division of the UK production company Particle6.  She was pitched as the “next Scarlett Johansson” and has attracted interest from talent agencies, though Hollywood unions and actors have strongly condemned her.

[The revelation that talent agents were in talks to sign an AI actor sparked widespread outrage from human actors and unions.  Actors like Emily Blunt and Whoopi Goldberg expressed dismay, and SAG-AFTRA, the film and television performers’ union, issued a statement condemning the AI creation for undermining human artistry.

[Critics argue that AI actors like Tilly Norwood raise several ethical red flags.  These include the fact that the technology is reportedly programmed from the work of countless human actors without obtaining their permission, crediting them, or compensating them; AI actors could replace human performers, jeopardizing livelihoods and devaluing human creativity; an AI cannot refuse to perform a scene, which raises concerns about portraying sexual or demeaning content without a real person’s consent; real-life individuals have come forward alleging that Tilly Norwood bears a striking resemblance to them, implying their likeness may have been used without permission.

[The London-based Dutch comedian, writer, actress, and producer Eline Van der Velden, founder of Particle6 and Xicoia, defended the creation, comparing AI to other tools like CGI and animation.  She stated that Tilly is “not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work—a piece of art.” 

[As part of her promotion, the AI Norwood has appeared in social media content, including headshots and a spoof advertisement on Instagram, and the two-minute, AI-generated film AI Commissioner (released in the United Kingdom on 30 July 2025).  The sketch was created entirely by AI, with the script written by ChatGPT and the production utilizing 10 different AI tools.

[AI Commissioner, which features the Norwood in her début role, is a short, AI-generated comedy sketch that satirizes the television development process being taken over by artificial intelligence.  It portrays a TV development executive pitching new programming ideas to an “AI Commissioner.”  The AI Commissioner operates under specific guidelines, including that there should be no plotlines involving dead women or missing children. 

[In minutes, the AI generates a flood of data-driven ideas, precisely optimized for channel viewing figures and audience metrics.  The AI selects an interactive thriller based on a viewer’s streaming history and delivery orders, titled I Know What You Streamed Last Summer. 

[In the comedy sketch, Norwood plays the role of an unnamed, AI-generated actress.  The AI Commissioner casts Norwood in the interactive thriller, with the TV executive commenting, “She’ll do anything I say.  I’m already in love.” 

[AI Commissioner was shown at the Zurich Summit of the 2025 Zurich Film Festival in September as a showcase for their AI-generated Tilly Norwood.  The video was posted to Particle6’s YouTube channel, where it quickly gained attention amid the controversy surrounding the AI actress.  

[The film received a very negative reception, with critics from publications like The Guardian describing it as “pointless and creepy” and “relentlessly unfunny.”  Many viewers also noted the awkward animation, blurred images, and wooden dialogue.  In addition to the video’s availability on YouTube, it was also shared on Norwood’s own social media platforms such as Instagram.  Despite the poor reviews, the video amassed hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, largely driven by the intense controversy and curiosity surrounding the creation of “Tilly Norwood.”] 

“AI ACTRESS TILLY NORWOOD TAKES THE SPOTLIGHT,
PROMPTING DEBATE AND OUTCRY IN HOLLYWOOD”
by Perry Russom

[I was watching the news one evening last month, and one report especially caught my attention.  It seems that I’m not the only one, either.  It was the announcement of an artificial actress, AI-created, who was already being sought by casting agencies in Hollywood.   In the following articles is the run-down as I’ve put it together.

[The account that got me hooked was aired on Eyewitness News, ABC7 New York (WABC-TV, Channel 7 in New York City) on 30 September 2025.  It’s datelined Los Angeles, which is where the story’s centered as of now.]

A new actress is taking the spotlight in Hollywood, and it is sparking a debate among actors. That’s because this actress isn’t real. They’re [sic] an AI called Tilly Norwood.

Actors are speaking out, responding to reports that multiple talent agencies are interested in signing the AI actress.

Tilly Norwood might seem like any other aspiring actress. She has an Instagram page showing off her screen tests, alongside candid moments.

She even posted a video on Facebook which she says features her first on-camera role.

But Tilly Norwood is not a real actress -- she’s a character generated by artificial intelligence.

Her creator says she’s getting very real attention.

Eline Van der Velden runs the AI talent company that made Tilly. She says, “When we first launched Tilly, people were like, ‘What’s that? And now we’re going to be announcing which agency is going to be representing her.”

But that announcement is not sitting well with many Hollywood stars.

Emily Blunt said, “That is really, really scary. Come on, agencies. Don’t do that.”

Marvel star Simu Liu said, “Movies are great, but you know what would be better is if the characters in them weren’t played by actual humans but by AI replicas approximating human emotion.”

Whoopi Goldberg said, “You are suddenly up against something that’s been generated with 5,000 other actors. It’s been given all of these . . [.] you know, it’s got Bette Davis’ attitude, it’s got this one, it’s got Humphrey Bogart’s humor. So, it’s a little bit of an unfair advantage.”

Van der Velden insists Tilly “. . [.] is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work -- a piece of art. . [. .] AI characters should be judged as part of their own genre, on their own merits, rather than compared directly with human actors.”

Just a few months ago, Van der Velden said she wanted Tilly to be the next Natalie Portman or Scarlet Johannsen.

The fashion industry is also under scrutiny. Guess and J.Crew have faced criticism for featuring AI models.

[Perry Russom is a multi-platform reporter at ABC News, contributing expertise across diverse broadcasting environments.  His background demonstrates versatile capabilities in news gathering, reporting, and on-air presentation.

[Prior to ABC News, Russom served as a correspondent for The News With Shepard Smith at CNBC International.  At NBCUniversal, he held the role of NBC10 Boston weekend anchor and also served as a reporter.  During his tenure with NBCUniversal, Perry also contributed as a New England Cable News weekend anchor.]

*  *  *  *
“TILLY NORWOOD DRAMA EXPLAINED: -
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT AI ACTRESS BACKLASH”
by Marni Rose McFall

[Published by Newsweek on 29 September 2025, this is the earliest report on Tilly Norwood I found online. It includes some of the first responses from movie folk that followed the unveiling of the unliving actress.]

A new actor has attracted the attention of multiple talent agencies. The catch? She’s not real.

Tilly Norwood, an "AI-generated actress," has caught the eyes—and sparked the ire—of the entertainment industry.

Why It Matters

The so-called "AI revolution" is well underway and is increasingly seeping into our media. AI-generated models, figures, and personalities have been gradually introduced into the mainstream, prompting an online backlash in turn.

In August, an AI model made its debut in an advertisement featured in Vogue for the first time, while the AI band The Velvet Sundown also sparked discourse earlier this year.

In July 2024, the online fashion and lifestyle publication SheerLuxe faced backlash after introducing an “AI-enhanced team member,” and the CGI model Lil Miquela sparked a slew of headlines in 2016.

What To Know

Norwood is a creation from the recently launched AI talent studio, Xicoia, a spinoff of Particle6, an AI production studio founded by Eline Van der Velden. Deadline reported that multiple Hollywood talent agencies are interested in signing Norwood. A post on the outlet’s Instagram has seen a slew of negative comments from high-profile Hollywood stars.

Velden spoke about Norwood at a panel at the Zurich Summit, a strand of the Zurich Film Festival.

Particle6 shared a statement with Newsweek from Van Der Velden in response to the online backlash. It read in part, “To those who have expressed anger over the creation of my AI character, Tilly Norwood: she is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work – a piece of art. Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity.”

What People Are Saying

Actor Mara Wilson wrote on Instagram in response to Deadline’s post: “And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?”

Actor Nicholas Ale Chavez wrote on Instagram in response to Deadline’s post: “Not an actress actually nice try.”

Actor Lucy Hale wrote on Instagram in response to Deadline’s post: “no.”

A statement from Eline Van Der Velden, shared with Newsweek by Particle6: “I also believe AI characters should be judged as part of their own genre, on their own merits, rather than compared directly with human actors. Each form of art has its place, and each can be valued for what it uniquely brings. I hope we can welcome AI as part of the wider artistic family: one more way to express ourselves, alongside theatre, film, painting, music, and countless others. When we celebrate all forms of creativity, we open doors to new voices, new stories, and new ways of connecting with each other.”

Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnegro, in a post on X: “This is literally the mark of the end of the industry as we know it. . . [. S]ay goodbye to actors. no one should be supporting this.”

What Happens Next

Whether an AI-generated actor will become part of mainstream cinema or television remains to be seen.

[Of course Tilly Norwood, and other creations like her, are “replacements” and substitutes for human beings.  Who does Van der Velden think she’s fooling?  What does she do that isn’t a representation of a person, one who’d otherwise be played by a live actor?  Even if she and her ilk were to be relegated to doing things a living actor or stunt performer can’t do, it’s still a “replacement” for a human.  And with each improvement in the technology, there will be less and less call for live performers. 

[So far, stage actors aren’t under the gun.  Yet.  Holograms are real now and have been used—experimentally as of now—on stage (see “The Ancient Art of Kabuki Made New, With Computer Animation” by Micheline Maynard, in “Computers and Actors, Part 1” [4 October 2021]), and for now, the projections are the images of real actors.  But it’s just over the horizon that Star Trek’s holodecks will be the prototypes for the stages for the next generation of playhouses.  I won’t be around to see it—Gott sei Dank—but some of you all will be.]

*  *  *  *
“SAG-AFTRA SLAMS AI ACTRESS:
‘TILLY NORWOOD IS NOT AN ACTOR —
IT HAS NO LIFE EXPERIENCE TO DRAW FROM, NO EMOTION’”
by Lily Ford

[The following report from the Hollywood Reporter of 30 September 2025 contains a statement on the introduction of an AI “actor” from the union that represents performers and other professionals who work in film and television and other media forms.]

“It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing livelihoods and devaluing human artistry,” the union has said in a statement.

SAG-AFTRA has slammed a newly launched AI talent studio in a statement released Tuesday, saying: “Creativity is, and should remain, human-centered.”

Over the weekend, the creator of the computer-generated actress Tilly Norwood responded to critics after news broke that her studio was looking to get Norwood representation.

Eline Van der Velden, Dutch founder of AI outfit Particle 6 Productions, announced at Zurich Film Festival the launch of Xicoia, “the world’s first artificial intelligence talent studio.” She was met with outrage, however, and later said in an Instagram post: “She is not a replacement for a human being.”

SAG-AFTRA, the U.S. labor union that represents actors and other talent, has now weighed in via a statement: “The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.”

“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it’s a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation,” said SAG-AFTRA. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn’t solve any ‘problem’ — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.

“Additionally,” the statement continued, “signatory producers should be aware that they may not use synthetic performers without complying with our contractual obligations, which require notice and bargaining whenever a synthetic performer is going to be used.”

The looming threat of AI has continued to panic the film and TV industry, and regulations around the craft became a linchpin clause through the SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023. Though AI’s use in the industry already spans myriad visual effects tools, many still worry that AI could, one day, replace actors — or at least illegally use their likeness.

Melissa Barrera, Nicholas Alexander Chavez, Lukas Gage, Mara Wilson and Toni Colette were among the stars condemning the news of Norwood’s possible signing.

Van der Velden defended her business on Sunday, saying: “I see AI not as a replacement for people, but as a new tool, a new paintbrush.” She said: “Just as animation, puppetry, or CGI opened fresh possibilities without taking away from live acting, AI offers another way to imagine and build stories. I’m an actor myself, and nothing — certainly not an AI character — can take away the craft or joy of human performance. . . . Creating Tilly has been, for me, an act of imagination and craftmanship, not unlike drawing a character, writing a role or shaping a performance.”

[These reports keep referring to Xicoia as a “talent studio.”  But the entity created by artificial intelligence has no “talent.”  It can’t.  The most common definition of ‘talent’ is a natural, innate ability or aptitude to do something well.  It’s often considered a gift with which a person is born.

[But an AI-created entity isn’t natural in the sense that it’s created by nature or natural processes.  By its very name, nothing about an AI creation is natural; it’s artificial, the very opposite of natural.

[Something that’s innate is born in a person.  Since an AI creation isn’t born at all, nothing within it can be innate.  It’s all simulated, contrived, programmed, engineered.  In the 1954 movie The Barefoot Contessa, Ava Gardner’s character, a would-be movie actor, asks Humphrey Bogart’s famous film director if he can teach her to act.  He replies, “If you can act, I can help you.  If you can’t, nobody can teach you.”

[The talent already has to be inside you.  Then a teacher, a guide, a mentor, a guru can teach you how to manage it, to control it, to make it work for you.  But that teacher cannot inject the talent into you.  And neither can a computer programmer.

[Lily Ford is the Hollywood Reporter’s U.K. reporter, covering breaking news, features, award shows, premières, and the like from across the pond in London.  She came to THR from ITV News as a multimedia producer and before that, PA Media, on their social media desk.  Ford graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Theology from the University of Cambridge and a year later, earned a master's in Broadcast Journalism from Cardiff University.]

*  *  *  *
“HOLLYWOOD’S AI ‘ACTRESS’ TILLY NORWOOD
SPARKS A FIERCE DEBATE OVER ‘TALENT’”
By Doug Melville

[The article below ran in Forbes magazine on 30 September 2025.]

Are AI “actresses” actual actresses?

This week, during the Zurich Film Festival, multihyphinate (actor/comedian/producer) Eline Van der Velden unveiled and discussed something, or someone, that instantly divided Hollywood: Tilly Norwood.

Tilly is the first AI actress from Eline’s newly launched AI talent studio, Xicoia, a spin-off from Particle6. Within hours of this announcement, Tilly dominated headlines as the “world’s first AI actress,” creating an instant debate, while drawing curiosity from talent agencies and condemnation from many working actors.

And while Elin’s position is that Tilly Norwood is not meant to be a replacement for flesh-and-blood performers. “She is a creation, a piece of art,” Van der Velden said. “AI is not a substitute for human craft, but a new paintbrush — like animation, puppetry, or CGI.” The framing has not calmed the storm, and the opinionated have become vocal.

The announcement of Tilly has landed in the midst of a community and industry still reeling from pandemic shutdowns, strikes, and shifting business models. The idea of an AI rival encroaching on their already scarce job opportunities feels like salt in the wound.

Perhaps the most high-profile critique came from Whoopi Goldberg, on The View. “The problem with this, in my humble opinion, is that you are suddenly up against something that’s been generated with 5,000 other actors,” she said. “It’s got Bette Davis’ attitude, Humphrey Bogart’s lips . . . and that’s an unfair advantage. But you can always tell them from us. We move differently, our faces move differently, our bodies move differently.”

Goldberg also noted that while today’s technology isn’t seamless, “maybe in two or three years” it will be — a timeline that alarms many performers worried about their livelihoods.

How Should We Categorize AI?

The music industry is facing a similar issue, as three AI-generated musicians have charted on Billboard. Where the questions posed are identical. Are AI singers musicians, and should their royalties be the same?

In this case, should Tilly be labeled an “actress,” or is that a term reserved for living, breathing professionals who dedicate years to honing their craft? Or is Tilly a “creation” as its creator has labeled her.

That question matters as language drives and shapes perception. Calling an algorithmically generated avatar an “actress” risks flattening the distinction between artistry and automation. For performers who endure endless auditions, career instability, and the pressure of carrying narratives with emotional truth, the suggestion that software deserves the same label is triggering.

While Eline insists she is not trying to erase humans, and that Tilly Norwood is simply the evolutionary lineage of cinematic innovation, from animation to CGI to motion capture. She also claims that Norwood could be “the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman,” which underscores the disconnect.

The controversy around Norwood is igniting a broader anxiety not only about performance but also about copyright, consent, and creative control.

Are the datasets used to train AI avatars composed of real actors’ likenesses, which have been borrowed without permission? If so, is an AI “actress” essentially a digital composite built on the backs of uncredited and uncompensated, human labor?

Goldberg widened the lens further, warning that “AI in the workplace” isn’t limited to Hollywood. “People talk about being so lonely that they don’t have a connection. If you stick with this, with AI, you won’t have any connection to anything but your phone,” she cautioned.

While AI continues to replicate patterns, it cannot live a childhood, endure rejection, or improvise in the moment with another human on set. And while acting often looks effortless, performers are quick to remind critics that craft is the invisible scaffolding behind every significant role: practice, empathy, lived experience, and emotional risk.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Will those who create AI talent be the new creatives studios and production companies seek? Will actors unify around this in a way they didn’t around other her [sic] disruptive technology? Or will this moment lay the foundation for a new form of storytelling told to audiences with new types of messengers?

This is only the beginning.

[A small note or admonition: in the Forbes article above, the name of Eline Van der Velden’s company is written as Particle 6.  Several other outlets I read also included the space between the word and the numeral, while others omit the space: Particle6.  I believe the latter is correct—no space—based on the way the company name is written on its own website.  That should be definitive, I think.

[Doug Melville is a celebrated advisor, author, and a foremost leading voice in business—across international equity, culture, and AI in the workforce.  As a former board executive at luxury group Richemont in Geneva, Switzerland, to author of Invisible Generals (Black Privilege Publishing, Atria, 2023), he’s been featured on CBS Saturday Morning, The Daily Show, Time, and The Breakfast Club.  Melville has traveled to over 70 countries and is a lecturer on Reputation Management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.  Previously he sat on the executive team of Magic Johnson Enterprises, and worked on Madison Avenue in the advertising industry under Omnicom.  He’s an alumnus of Syracuse University.

[There are a number of posts on Rick On Theater that deal with the convergence of theater, acting, or performing and computers or related technology.  Here’s a list with links for the curious reader:

    • “Theater and Computers,” 5 December 2009
• “Diaspora: Night at theater may mean more than watching” by Celia Wren; in “Technologies Old and New,” 9 March 2018
•“Computers and Actors,” 4 and 7 October 2021
•“‘Entertainment in the Age of AI,’” 22 August 2022
•“‘AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can’t Go Quietly’” by Justine Bateman, 4 June 2023
•“‘The Playwright in the Age of AI’” by Jeffrey Goldberg, 7 March 2025

[There are also posts that deal with computer technology in fields like lighting and scenic design which I didn’t include in this list.]

Carl Sagan

 

[Carl Sagan (1934-96) was a renowned astronomer, author, and science communicator born in Brooklyn, Nn ew York.  He received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago.  As an undergraduate, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts in liberal arts (with honors) in 1954 and then a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1955.  The Master of Science degree in physics was granted in 1956, and the Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960.  Sagan held a distinguished position as a professor of astronomy and space science at Cornell, while also directing its Laboratory for Planetary Studies and co-founding the Planetary Society.   

[A passionate advocate for scientific understanding, he captivated audiences worldwide with the groundbreaking 1980 Public Broadcasting Service series Cosmos, which inspired over 500 million viewers and led to a bestselling companion book. Among his many influential works, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence earned him a Pulitzer Prize, while his contributions to planetary science were recognized with numerous awards, including NASA medals and the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.  

[Sagan was a popular public advocate of skeptical scientific inquiry, which questions the veracity of claims lacking scientific evidence, and the scientific method; he pioneered the field of exobiology, the study of life beyond the earth's atmosphere, as on other planets, and promoted the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).  He even wrote a science-fiction novel, published in 1985, called Contact, in which a SETI scientist finds evidence of extraterrestrial life and is chosen to make first contact.  It became the basis for the 1997 film of the same name starring Jodie Foster as the astronomer.

[Sagan played pivotal roles in several NASA missions and remains celebrated for his ability to engage the public with the wonders of science, leaving a lasting legacy in both the scientific community and popular culture.

[Sagan was an early advocate for the rights and compassionate treatment of animals, emphasizing our shared kinship with all life and the ethical implications of animal suffering, according to The Dragons of Eden.  He argued that humanity’s refusal to acknowledge animal sentience is a rationalization for their exploitation.]

“THE ABSTRACTIONS OF BEASTS”
by Carl Sagan 

[Below is Chapter 5 of Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (Random House, 1977)]

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character . . . by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so.

—Carl Linnaeus [1707-78; Swedish biologist and physician],

the founder of taxonomy, 1788

 

“Beasts abstract not,” announced John Locke [1632-1704; English philosopher and physician; one of the most influential of the Enlightenment thinkers; known for An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/90)], expressing mankind’s prevailing opinion throughout recorded history. Bishop [George] Berkeley [1685-1753; Anglo-Irish philosopher, writer, and clergyman; author of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)] had, however, a sardonic rejoinder: “If the fact that brutes abstract not be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number.” Abstract thought, at least in its more subtle varieties, is not an invariable accompaniment of everyday life for the average man. Could abstract thought be a matter not of kind but of degree? Could other animals be capable of abstract thought but more rarely or less deeply than humans?

We have the impression that other animals are not very intelligent. But have we examined the possibility of animal intelligence carefully enough, or, as in Francois Truffaut’s poignant film The Wild Child, do we simply equate the absence of our style of expression of intelligence with the absence of intelligence? In discussing communication with the animals, the French philosopher [Michel de] Montaigne [1533-92; one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance (ca. 1494-1610)] remarked, “The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may it not be on our part as well as theirs?”*

[The Wild Child (L'Enfant sauvage; released in the United Kingdom as The Wild Boy) is a 1970 French historical drama film co-written and directed by, and starring François Truffaut (1932-84). It’s based on the true events regarding Victor of Aveyron (French: Victor de l’Aveyron; c. 1788-1828) was a French feral child found around the age of 9 in 1800; Jean-Pierre Cargol [b. 1957]), a late 18th-century French child who spent the first eleven or twelve years of his life with little or no human contact. (Note the discrepancy between the ages of the real Vincent [ca. 9] and the character in the film [ca. 11-12].) Truffaut’s screenplay, along with commentary on the making of the film, is published in The Wild Child by François Truffaut and Jean Gruault, trans. Linda Lewin and Christine Lémery (Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1973).]

([nb: Insertions marked with asterisks are original footnotes from Sagan’s text.] *Our difficulties in understanding or effectuating communication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world. For example, dolphins and whales, who sense their surrounding with a quite elaborate sonar echo location technique, also communicate with each other by a rich and elaborate set of clicks, whose interpretation has so far eluded human attempts to understand it. One very clever recent suggestion, which is now being investigated, is that dolphin/dolphin communication involves a re-creation of the sonar reflection characteristics of the objects being described. In this view a dolphin does not “say” a single word for shark, but rather transmits a set of clicks corresponding to the audio reflection spectrum it would obtain on irradiating a shark with sound waves in the dolphin’s sonar mode. The basic form of dolphin/dolphin communication in this view would be a sort of aural onomatopoeia, a drawing of audio frequency pictures—-in this case, caricatures of a shark. We could well imagine the extension of such a language from concrete to abstract ideas, and by the use of a kind of audio rebus [an arrangement of pictures, symbols, and/or words representing phrases or words, especially as a word puzzle]—both analogous to the development in Mesopotamia and Egypt of human written languages. It would also be possible, then, for dolphins to create extraordinary audio images out of their imaginations rather than their experience.)

There is, of course, a considerable body of anecdotal information suggesting chimpanzee intelligence. The first serious study of the behavior of simians—including their behavior in the wild—was made in Indonesia by Alfred Russel Wallace [1823-1913; English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, and illustrator], the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection [1858; see “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type” (known as the “Ternate essay”)]. Wallace concluded that a baby orangutan he studied behaved “exactly like a human child in similar circumstances.” In fact, “orangutan” is a Malay phrase meaning not ape but “man of the woods.” [Hans-Lukas] Teuber [1916-77; German-born neuropsychologist (scientist who investigates the mechanical, electrical, and biochemical processes of the nervous system) and professor of psychology] recounted many stories told by his parents, pioneer German ethologists [scientists who explore animal behavior, especially nonhuman animals] who founded and operated the first research station devoted to chimpanzee behavior on Tenerife in the Canary Islands early in the second decade of this century [i.e., 1910s]. It was here that Wolfgang Kohler [1887-1967; German psychologist and phenomenologist (psychologist who attempts to explain experiences from the point of view of the subject via the analysis of their written or spoken words)] performed his famous studies [1913-17] of Sultan, a chimpanzee “genius” who was able to connect two rods in order to reach an otherwise inaccessible banana. On Tenerife, also, two chimpanzees were observed maltreating a chicken. One would extend some food to the fowl, encouraging it to approach; whereupon the other would thrust at it with a piece of wire it had concealed behind its back. The chicken would retreat but soon allow itself to approach once again and be beaten once again. Here is a fine combination of behavior sometimes thought to be uniquely human: cooperation, planning a future course of action, deception and cruelty. It also reveals that chickens have a very low capacity for avoidance learning.

Until a few years ago, the most extensive attempt to communicate with chimpanzees went something like this: A newborn chimp was taken into a household with a newborn baby, and both would be raised together—twin cribs, twin bassinets, twin high chairs, twin potties, twin diaper pails, twin baby powder cans. At the end of three years, the young chimp had, of course, far outstripped the young human in manual dexterity, running, leaping, climbing and other motor skills. But while the child was happily babbling away, the chimp could say only, and with enormous difficulty, “Mama,” “Papa,” and “cup.” From this it was widely concluded that in language, reasoning and other higher mental functions, chimpanzees were only minimally competent: “Beasts abstract not.”

But in thinking over these experiments, two psychologists, Beatrice [1933-95; zoologist and ethologist] and Robert Gardner [1930-2021; comparative psychologist (psychologist who studies the similarities and differences between animal and human psychology)], at the University of Nevada realized that the pharynx and larynx of the chimp are not suited for human speech. Human beings exhibit a curious multiple use of the mouth for eating, breathing and communicating. In insects such as crickets, which call to one another by rubbing their legs, these three functions are performed by completely separate organ systems. Human spoken language seems to be adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities. It might be, the Gardners reasoned, that chimpanzees have substantial language abilities which could not be expressed because of the limitations of their anatomy. Was there any symbolic language, they asked, that could employ the strengths rather than the weaknesses of chimpanzee anatomy?

[In zoology, ‘adventitious’ refers to a structure or organ that isn’t congenital (i.e., present at birth) and/or appears in an atypical location or by chance. Sagan uses ‘adventitious’ above to describe human speech in an evolutionary context because the structures of the mouth were originally adapted for eating and breathing, but over evolutionary time, they were repurposed for speech. He was referring to the evolutionary history of the organs involved as ‘adventitious,’ not the function (human speech), itself. While its origin was a matter of evolutionary chance, the resulting ability became a fixed, intrinsic, and innate characteristic of humans through natural selection over time.]

The Gardners hit upon a brilliant idea: Teach a chimpanzee American sign language, known by its acronym Ameslan, and sometimes as “American deaf and dumb language” (the “dumb” refers, of course, to the inability to speak and not to any failure of intelligence). It is ideally suited to the immense manual dexterity of the chimpanzee. It also may have all the crucial design features of verbal languages.

There is by now a vast library of described and filmed conversations, employing Ameslan and other gestural languages, with Washoe, Lucy, Lana and other chimpanzees studied by the Gardners and others. Not only are there chimpanzees with working vocabularies of 100 to 200 words; they are also able to distinguish among nontrivially different grammatical patterns and syntaxes. What is more, they have been remarkably inventive in the construction of new words and phrases.

On seeing for the first time a duck land quacking in a pond, Washoe gestured “water bird,” which is the same phrase used in English and other languages, but which Washoe invented for the occasion. Having never seen a spherical fruit other than an apple, but knowing the signs for the principal colors, Lana, upon spying a technician eating an orange, signed “orange apple. After tasting a watermelon, Lucy described it as “candy drink or “drink fruit,” which is essentially the same word form as the English “water melon.” But after she had burned her mouth on her first radish, Lucy forever after described them as “cry hurt food.” A small doll placed unexpectedly in Washoe’s cup elicited the response “Baby in my drink.” When Washoe soiled, particularly clothing or furniture, she was taught the sign “dirty,” which she then extrapolated as a general term of abuse. A rhesus monkey that evoked her displeasure was repeatedly signed at: “Dirty monkey, dirty monkey, dirty monkey.” Occasionally Washoe would say things like “Dirty Jack, gimme drink” [probably one of Washoe’s human handlers, but no one by this name is recorded in the records or published accounts of Washoe’s life (1965-2007)]. Lana, in a moment of creative annoyance, called her trainer “You green shit.” Chimpanzees have invented swear words. Washoe also seems to have a sort of sense of humor; once, when riding on her trainer’s shoulders and, perhaps inadvertently, wetting him, she signed: “Funny, funny.”

Lucy was eventually able to distinguish clearly the meanings of the phrases “Roger tickle Lucy” [probably primatologist Roger Fouts (b. 1943), who taught Lucy Ameslan] and “Lucy tickle Roger,” both of which activities she enjoyed with gusto. Likewise, Lana extrapolated from “Tim groom Lana” [probably prime researcher, and prime worker with Lana, Dr. Timothy V. Gill (b. 1947)] to “Lana groom Tim.” Washoe was observed “reading” a magazine—i.e., slowly turning the pages, peering intently at the pictures and making, to no one in particular, an appropriate sign, such as “cat” when viewing a photograph of a tiger, and “drink” when examining a Vermouth advertisement. Having learned the sign “open” with a door, Washoe extended the concept to a briefcase. She also attempted to converse in Ameslan with the laboratory cat, who turned out to be the only illiterate in the facility. Having acquired this marvelous method of communication, Washoe may have been surprised that the cat was not also competent in Ameslan. And when one day Jane [probably Jane W. Temerlin (b. 1934), wife of psychologist Maurice K. Temerlin (1924-88), with whom she raised Lucy], Lucy’s foster mother, left the laboratory, Lucy gazed after her and signed: “Cry me. Me cry.

Boyce Rensberger [b. 1942] is a sensitive and gifted reporter for the New York Times whose parents could neither speak nor hear, although he is in both respects normal. His first language, however, was Ameslan. He had been abroad on a European assignment for the Times for some years. On his return to the United States, one of his first domestic duties was to look into the Gardners’ experiments with Washoe. After some little time with the chimpanzee, Rensberger reported, “Suddenly I realized I was conversing with a member of another species in my native tongue.” The use of the word tongue is, of course, figurative: it is built deeply into the structure of the language (a word that also means tongue). In fact, Rensberger was conversing with a member of another species in his native “hand.” And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability—lost, according to [Flavius] Josephus [ca. 37-ca. 100 BCE; Roman-Jewish historian and military leader; best known for writing The Jewish War (ca. 75 BCE)], since Eden—to communicate with the animals.

In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. At the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center [now the Emory National Primate Research Center] in Atlanta, Georgia, they are learning a specific computer language called (by the humans, not the chimps) “Yerkish.” The computer records all of its subjects’ conversations, even during the night when no humans are in attendance; and from its ministrations we have learned that chimpanzees prefer jazz to rock and movies about chimpanzees to movies about human beings. Lana had, by January 1976, viewed The Developmental Anatomy of the Chimpanzee 245 times. She would undoubtedly appreciate a larger film library.

[I tried to identify the film Lana liked so much which Sagan names above, but there’s no record of The Developmental Anatomy of the Chimpanzee on the Internet (except in reference to this passage in “The Abstraction of Beasts”). (I haven’t had time to do old-school research in a library, though I may do so in the near future.)

[The most plausible explanation I can come up with is that “The Developmental Anatomy of the Chimpanzee” wasn’t a video for public consumption as a documentary film or television broadcast, but a research video of an experiment or observation, possibly at Yerkes, itself, or one of the other labs doing work with chimpanzees and primates, and therefore the title isn’t listed in any film database. If it’s a lab video, the “title” may, in fact, just be a descriptive label.]

In the illustration on page 114 [“Lana at her computer”], Lana is shown requesting, in proper Yerkish, a piece of banana from the computer. The syntax required to request from the computer water, juice, chocolate candy, music, movies, an open window and companionship are also displayed. (The machine provides for many of Lana’s needs, but not all. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she forlornly types out: “Please, machine, tickle Lana.”) More elaborate requests and commentaries, each requiring a creative use of a set grammatical form, have been developed subsequently.

Lana monitors her sentences on a computer display, and erases those with grammatical errors. Once, in the midst of Lana’s construction of an elaborate sentence, her trainer mischievously and repeatedly interposed, from his separate computer console, a word that made nonsense of Lana’s sentence. She gazed at her computer display, spied her trainer at his console, and composed a new sentence: “Please, Tim, leave room.” Just as Washoe and Lucy can be said to speak, Lana can be said to write.

At an early stage in the development of Washoe’s verbal abilities, Jacob Bronowski [1908-74; Polish-British mathematician, science historian, and philosopher] and a colleague [Ursula Bellugi (1931-2022; American cognitive neuroscientist [scientist who studies the biological processes that underlie cognition])] wrote a scientific paper [“Washoe the chimpanzee,” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C; 169.3943 [24 July 1970])] denying the significance of Washoe’s use of gestural language because, in the limited data available to Bronowski, Washoe neither inquired nor negated. But later observations showed that Washoe and other chimpanzees were perfectly able both to ask questions and to deny assertions put to them. And it is difficult to see any significant difference in quality between chimpanzee use of gestural language and the use of ordinary speech by children in a manner that we unhesitatingly attribute to intelligence. In reading Bronowski’s paper I cannot help but feel that a little pinch of human chauvinism has crept in, an echo of Locke’s “Beasts abstract not.” In 1949, the American anthropologist Leslie White [1900-75] stated unequivocally: “Human behavior is symbolic behavior; symbolic behavior is human behavior.” What would White have made of Washoe, Lucy and Lana?

[Indeed, if using gestural language to communicate is a sign of a lack of intellect, what would White have made of deaf or mute people, who use Ameslan as their “native tongue,” as Boyce Rensberger put it?]

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These findings on chimpanzee language and intelligence have an intriguing bearing on “Rubicon” arguments—the contention that the total brain mass, or at least the ratio of brain to body mass, is a useful index of intelligence. Against this point of view it was once argued that the lower range of the brain masses of microcephalic humans overlaps the upper range of brain masses of adult chimpanzees and gorillas; and yet, it was said, microcephalies have some, although severely impaired, use of language—while the apes have none. But in only relatively few cases are microcephalies capable of human speech. One of the best behavioral descriptions of microcephalies was written by a Russian physician, S. [Sergei] Korsakov [1854-1900; Russian neuropsychiatrist (a medical doctor specializing in disorders affecting a person’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors [psychiatry] based on how the brain functions [neurology]) known for his studies on alcoholic psychosis], who in 1893 observed a female microcephalic named “Masha.” She could understand a very few questions and commands and could occasionally reminisce on her childhood. She sometimes chattered away, but there was little coherence to what she uttered. Korsakov characterized her speech as having “an extreme poverty of logical associations.” As an example of her poorly adapted and automaton-like intelligence, Korsakov described her eating habits. When food was present on the table, Masha [likely Maria Babak] would eat. But if the food was abruptly removed in the midst of a meal, she would behave as if the meal had ended, thanking those in charge and piously blessing herself. If the food were returned, she would eat again. The pattern apparently was subject to indefinite repetition. My own impression is that Lucy or Washoe would be a far more interesting dinner companion than Masha, and that the comparison of microcephalic humans with normal apes is not inconsistent with some sort of Rubicon of intelligence. Of course, both the quality and the quantity of neural connections are probably vital for the sorts of intelligence that we can easily recognize.

[The allusion to “‘Rubicon’ arguments” above is to the Rubicon River in northeastern Italy. In ancient times, it was the boundary between Rome and its Germanic provinces. The ‘arguments’ referred to here are those assuming a definitive boundary between different kinds of intelligence.

[Microcephaly is a neurological disorder in which the person affected has an abnormally small head due to a failure of brain growth. The causes are several and various; microcephaly may be congenital or acquired, genetic or caused by disease, injury, or the ingestion of certain substances, among other potential causes. People with this disorder (microcephalics) often have an intellectual disability, poor motor function, poor speech, abnormal facial features, seizures, and dwarfism.

[Identifying “Masha” as Maria Babak, is speculative.  ‘Masha’ is the standard nickname for ‘Maria,’ Russian for ‘Mary,’ but her actual identity is unrecorded. Nothing is known of the patient “Masha,” which may not even be he actual name, but a pseudonym selected by Korsakov for his records. (One thing is certain: “Masha” is not Maria Babak, Russian-born and -educated assistant professor of chemistry at the City University of Hong Kong, who’s called Masha.)]

Recent experiments performed by James Dewson [1934-99; speech pathologist and audiologist (therapist who treats disorders of speech, language, swallowing, or voice; healthcare professional who diagnoses, treats and/or manages hearing and balance disorders)] of the Stanford University School of Medicine and his colleagues give some physiological support to the idea of language centers in the simian neocortex [a portion of the mammalian brain involved in higher-order brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, and language]—in particular, like humans, in the left hemisphere. Monkeys were trained to press a green light when they heard a hiss and a red light when they heard a tone. Some seconds after a sound was heard, the red or the green light would appear at some unpredictable position—different each time on the control panel. The monkey pressed the appropriate light and, in the case of a correct guess, was rewarded with a pellet of food. Then the time interval between hearing the sound and seeing the light was increased up to twenty seconds. In order to be rewarded, the monkeys now had to remember for twenty seconds which noise they had heard. Dewson’s team then surgically excised part of the so-called auditory association cortex from the left hemisphere of the neocortex in the temporal lobe. When retested, the monkeys had very poor recall of which sound they were then hearing. After less than a second they could not recall whether it was a hiss or a tone. The removal of a comparable part of the temporal lobe from the right hemisphere produced no effect whatever on this task. “It looks,” Dewson was reported to say, “as if we removed the structure in the monkeys’ brains that may be analogous to human language centers. Similar studies on rhesus monkeys, but using visual rather than auditory stimuli, seem to show no evidence of a difference between the hemispheres of the neocortex.

Because adult chimpanzees are generally thought (at least by zookeepers) to be too dangerous to retain in a home or home environment, Washoe and other verbally accomplished chimpanzees have been involuntarily “retired” soon after reaching puberty. Thus we do not yet have experience with the adult language abilities of monkeys and apes. One of the most intriguing questions is whether a verbally accomplished chimpanzee mother will be able to communicate language to her offspring. It seems very likely that this should be possible and that a community of chimps initially competent in gestural language could pass down the language to subsequent generations.

[Sagan’s claim that we lack experience with adult primate language is no longer entirely true, thanks to decades of further research. Studies since 1977 have shown that great apes can develop significant language-like abilities in laboratory settings. Contemporary research, however, has largely shifted from trying to teach human language to apes to studying their natural communication systems. This includes observing gestures, facial expressions, and calls in wild and captive populations to understand the extent of their natural communicative prowess.

[While Sagan was correct in 1977 that we lacked extensive data on the adult language use of apes, later research has changed our understanding. The more nuanced conclusion that human language is fundamentally different from animal communication—a key point of Sagan's original work—is still strongly supported by scientific findings.]

Where such communication is essential for survival, there is already some evidence that apes transmit extragenetic or cultural information. Jane Goodall observed baby chimps in the wild emulating the behavior of their mothers and learning the reasonably complex task of finding an appropriate twig and using it to prod into a termite’s nest so as to acquire some of these tasty delicacies.

[‘Extragenetic’ refers to traits or information that can still be passed from one generation to the next, but they do so through non-DNA-based mechanisms. Examples are, among other processes, the transmission of changes caused by mechanisms like DNA modification, where chemical tags are placed on genes to turn them on or off; or the transmission of learned behaviors or preferences from one generation to the next, such as parental diet influencing an offspring’s food preferences through behavioral cues.]

Differences in group behavior—something that it is very tempting to call cultural differences—have been reported among chimpanzees, baboons, macaques and many other primates. For example, one group of monkeys may know how to eat bird’s eggs, while an adjacent band of precisely the same species may not. Such primates have a few dozen sounds or cries, which are used for intra-group communication, with such meanings as “Flee; here is a predator.” But the sound of the cries differs somewhat from group to group: there are regional accents.

An even more striking experiment was performed accidentally by Japanese primatologists attempting to relieve an overpopulation and hunger problem in a community of macaques [a category of monkey common to Asia, North Africa, and southern Europe] on an island in south Japan [Koshima Island]. The anthropologists threw grains of wheat on a sandy beach. Now it is very difficult to separate wheat grains one by one from sand grains; such an effort might even expend more energy than eating the collected wheat would provide. But one brilliant macaque, Imo, perhaps by accident or out of pique, threw handfuls of the mixture into the water. Wheat floats; sand sinks, a fact that Imo clearly noted. Through the sifting process she was able to eat well (on a diet of soggy wheat, to be sure). While older macaques, set in their ways, ignored her, the younger monkeys appeared to grasp the importance of her discovery, and imitated it. In the next generation, the practice was more widespread; today all macaques on the island are competent at water sifting, an example of a cultural tradition among the monkeys.

Earlier studies on Takasakiyama, a mountain in northeast Kyushu inhabited by macaques, show a similar pattern in cultural evolution. Visitors to Takasakiyama threw caramels wrapped in paper to the monkeys—a common practice in Japanese zoos, but one the Takasakiyama macaques had never before encountered. In the course of play, some young monkeys discovered how to unwrap the caramels and eat them. The habit was passed on successively to their playmates, their mothers, the dominant males (who among the macaques act as babysitters for the very young) and finally to the subadult males, who were at the furthest social remove from the monkey children. The process of acculturation took more than three years. In natural primate communities, the existing nonverbal communications are so rich that there is little pressure for the development of a more elaborate gestural language. But if gestural language were necessary for chimpanzee survival, there can be little doubt that it would be transmitted culturally down through the generations.

I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number. Although a few years ago it would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not appear to me out of the question that, after a few generations in such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published in English or Japanese (with perhaps an “as told to” after the by-line).

[It’s interesting to note that the film Planet of the Apes, the first in that franchise (and a loose adaptation of a 1963 French novel, La Planète des singes by Pierre Boulle [1912-94]), in which Earth astronauts discover a society dominated by articulate apes, was released in 1968, nine years before Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden was published. The simian society, in which humans are intellectually diminished, experimented on, and enslaved, is revealed to be Earth 20 centuries (approximately 80 generations) in the future—though, of course, we don’t actually know how soon after the collapse of the human society the rise of the simians began.]

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as “human rights”? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts at conversion?

I recently was escorted through a large primate research laboratory by its director. We approached a long corridor lined, to the vanishing point as in a perspective drawing, with caged chimpanzees. They were one, two or three to a cage, and I am sure the accommodations were exemplary as far as such institutions (or for that matter traditional zoos) go. As we approached the nearest cage, its two inmates bared their teeth and with incredible accuracy let fly great sweeping arcs of spittle, fairly drenching the lightweight suit of the facility’s director. They then uttered a staccato of short shrieks, which echoed down the corridor to be repeated and amplified by other caged chimps, who had certainly not seen us, until the corridor fairly shook with the screeching and banging and rattling of bars. The director informed me that not only spit is apt to fly in such a situation; and at his urging we retreated.

I was powerfully reminded of those American motion pictures of the 1930s and 40s, set in some vast and dehumanized state or federal penitentiary, in which the prisoners banged their eating utensils against the bars at the appearance of the tyrannical warden. These chimps are healthy and well-fed. If they are only animals, if they are beasts which abstract not, then my comparison is a piece of sentimental foolishness. But chimpanzees can abstract. Like other mammals, they are capable of strong emotions. They have certainly committed no crimes. I do not claim to have the answer, but I think it is certainly worthwhile to raise the question: Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison?

For all we know, occasional viable crosses between humans and chimpanzees are possible.* The natural experiment must have been tried very infrequently, at least recently. If such off-spring are ever produced, what will their legal status be? The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due, and can, I hope, help to extend our ethical perspectives downward through the taxa [plural of ‘taxon,’ a scientific term for any group of organisms that are classified together based on shared characteristics; the science, technique, or process of making classifications is ‘taxonomy’] on Earth and upwards to extraterrestrial organisms, if they exist.

(*Until fairly recently it was thought that humans had forty-eight chromosomes in an ordinary somatic cell. We now know that the correct number is forty-six. Chimps apparently really do have forty-eight chromosomes, and in this case a viable cross of a chimpanzee and a human would in any event be rare. [The error was determined in 1955 and published in 1956 by researchers in Sweden. A viable hybrid of a human and a chimpanzee is widely considered impossible for several reasons rooted in genetics and evolutionary divergence.])

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It is hard to imagine the emotional significance for chimpanzees of learning language. Perhaps the closest analogy is the discovery of language by intelligent human beings with severe sensory organ impairment. While the depth of understanding, intelligence and sensitivity of Helen Keller [1880-1968; author, disability rights advocate, political activist, and lecturer; lost her sight and her hearing when she was 19 months old], who could neither see, hear nor speak, greatly exceeds that of any chimpanzee, her account of her discovery of language carries some of the feeling tone that this remarkable development in primate languages may convey to the chimpanzee, particularly in a context where language enhances survival or is strongly reinforced. 

One day Miss Keller’s teacher prepared to take her for a walk: 

She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the still, fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over my hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that W-A-T-E-R meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be swept away.

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned into the house, every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.

[Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (1903)]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of these three exquisite paragraphs is Helen Keller’s own sense that her brain had a latent capability for language, needing only to be introduced to it. This essentially Platonic idea is also, as we have seen, consistent with what is known, from brain lesions, of the physiology of the neocortex; and also with the theoretical conclusions drawn by Noam Chomsky [b. 1928; professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism] of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from comparative linguistics and laboratory experiments on learning. In recent years it has become clear that the brains of nonhuman primates are similarly prepared, although probably not quite to the same degree, for the introduction of language.

The long-term significance of teaching language to the other primates is difficult to overestimate. There is an arresting passage in Charles Darwin’s [1809-82; English naturalist, geologist, and biologist; known for his contributions to evolutionary biology] Descent of Man [1871]: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. . . . If it could be proved that certain high mental powers, such as the formation of general concepts, self-consciousness, et cetera, were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly-advanced intellectual faculties; and these again mainly the results of the continued use of a perfect language.”

[The term ‘perfect language’ generally refers to a language that is precise, unambiguous, and perfectly capable of representing all knowledge or reality. This ideal has been explored by philosophers, linguists, and logicians for centuries, with different fields defining ‘perfect’ in various ways.

[For philosophers, the pursuit of a perfect or ‘ideal’ language, which would eliminate the vagueness, multiple meanings, and imprecise structure found in natural languages, dates back to the 17th century. From a linguistic standpoint, however, the concept of a perfect language is generally regarded as a myth because natural human languages have not developed with absolute perfection.]

This same opinion on the remarkable powers of language and human intercommunication can be found in quite a different place, the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel. God, in a strangely defensive attitude for an omnipotent being, is worried that men intend to build a tower that will reach to heaven. (His attitude is similar to the concern he expresses after Adam eats the apple.) To prevent Mankind from reaching heaven, at least metaphorically, God does not destroy the tower, as, for example, Sodom is destroyed. Instead, he says, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:6-7).

The continued use of a “perfect” language . . . What sort of culture, what kind of oral tradition would chimpanzees establish after a few hundred or a few thousand years of communal use of a complex gestural language? And if there were such an isolated continuous chimpanzee community, how would they begin to view the origin of language? Would the Gardners and the workers at the Yerkes Primate Center be remembered dimly as legendary folk heroes or gods of another species? Would there be myths, like those of Prometheus, Thoth, or Oannes, about divine beings who had given the gift of language to the apes? In fact, the instruction of chimpanzees in gestural language distinctly has some of the same emotion tone and religious sense of the (truly fictional) episode in the movie and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] in which a representative of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization somehow instructs our hominid ancestors.

[In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a Titan, one of the deities that preceded Zeus and the Olympians. In some versions of his myth, Prometheus is credited with creating mankind from clay. He then defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to his creation in the form of technology, knowledge, and civilization. He is also generally seen as the author of the human arts and sciences.

[Thoth is an ancient Egyptian god credited with inventing hieroglyphic writing, creating languages, and serving as the scribe for the gods. His mastery of language was tied to his other roles as the god of wisdom, knowledge, and magic.

[Oannes is an ancient Mesopotamian (specifically Sumerian and Babylonian) mythological culture hero. He was one of the Apkallu, or mythical sages; half-man, half-fish, he emerged from the Persian Gulf to teach humanity the knowledge needed for civilization. Among other things, Oannes taught humans written language, the sciences, and the arts.]

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this entire subject is that there are nonhuman primates so close to the edge of language, so willing to learn, so entirely competent in its use and inventive in its application once the language is taught. But this raises a curious question: Why are they all on the edge? Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence. (This may have been particularly true of the nonhuman primates who lived in the savannahs; the forests must have offered some protection to chimpanzees and gorillas from the depredations of man.) We may have been the agent of natural selection in suppressing the intellectual competition. I think we may have pushed back the frontiers of intelligence and language ability among the nonhuman primates until their intelligence became just indiscernible. In teaching gestural language to the chimpanzees, we are beginning a belated attempt to make amends.

[I was first introduced to this essay, as I noted in my afterword to my post earlier this week on Jane Goodall, when I taught expository writing to college undergraduates.  Our reading assignments came from The Norton Reader (1984 edition).  At the time, I didn’t realize that Norton truncated the chapter of Sagan’s book; I later discovered that the final nine paragraphs, including the Helen Keller passage (but not counting my insertions), were deleted.  I haven’t repeated that choice on Rick On Theater.

[Readers will note that Sagan published Dragons of Eden in 1977.  Though the animal rights movement can trace its origins back to Victorian England, the contemporary movement started in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s.  In the United States, there were demonstrations and protests against the inhumane treatment of animals on the 1960s and ’70s, but as a movement, animal rights were considered a fringe cause.  In the ’80s and ’90s, however, mainstream academics and professionals joined the cause.

[PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) was formed in 1980, three years after Sagan’s book came out, though its tactics were considered by many to be extreme.  Some of what Sagan proposes in “The Abstraction of Beasts” must have seemed almost outrageous as well when the book first came out.  It doesn’t seem nearly so radical now.]

Jane Goodall (1934-2025)

 

[Rick On Theater readers no doubt know that Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee primatologist, died on 1 October.  When I was teaching writing at New York University, one of our reading assignments was an excerpt from her 1971 book In the Shadow of Man, and I decided to post that along with an obit as a tribute to Dr. Goodall.  In the out-take, Goodall describes seeing one of the chimps, David Greybeard, use a blade of grass as a scoop to get termites out of their nest, the observation that led her to determine that chimpanzees make and use tools. 

[I had taken biology in 9th grade (1962-63), and we’d learned the taxonomy of the biosphere, the phyla, genera, species, and so on of the plant and animal kingdoms.  That included the principal definitions for each grouping.  For Homo sapiens, that included the distinction of being the only animal that made and used tools.  Reading the Goodall was the first I’d known that this was wrong.

[That and one other revelation has stayed with me ever since: that chimps learn new behavior and pass it along to the next generation.  That was another thing that was supposed the be the province only of humans.

[Reading about Jane Goodall, you’re sure to encounter a number of words about various related fields of science.  Though some of the names for these scientific specialists are heard or seen fairly often in newspapers and magazines and on the Internet, but others may be unfamiliar to some readers.  I’ve picked out some of those in recent articles about Jane Goodall and written out definitions for them.  Here’s the list:

    •   animal psychologist (also called ‘comparative psychologist’) – a scientist who studies the behavior and mental processes of non-human animals
•   anthropologist – an expert in the scientific study of Homo sapiens, that is human beings
•   archaeologist (sometimes spelled ‘archaeologist’) – someone who practices the study of the past  by excavation and analysis of its material remains
•   biological anthropologist (also known as ‘physical anthropologist’), a scientist concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective
•   biologist – someone versed in the science of the study of all life or living matter
•   developmental psychologist – a scientist who studies how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives
•   ethologist – a person who studies animalian behavior, especially that of nonhuman animals
•   evolutionary biologist – a scientist working in the subfield of biology concerned with the origin and descent  of species and as their evolution, multiplication, and diversity over time
•   naturalist – an expert in natural history or the study of plants and animals (not to be confused with ‘naturist,’ which is another word for ‘nudist’); before the 20th century, ‘natural history’ meant what we call ‘science’ today
•   paleontologist – someone who studies the forms of life existing in prehistoric or geologic times, especially as represented by fossils
•   paleoanthropologist (sometimes spelled ‘paleanthropologist’) – a scientist who specializes in the scientific study of ancient human remains
•   primatologist – a specialist in the scientific study of primates (the mammalian order that encompasses apes—including humans—monkeys, lemurs, and other groups)
•   zoologist – one who studies the part of biology relating to the animal kingdom 

[Goodall is also labeled an activist and a conservationist, but those aren’t scientific designations, and I think their senses are self-evident.] 

“JANE GOODALL, WHO REVEALED
THE LIVES OF CHIMPS, DIES AT 91”
by Keith Schneider 

[The New York Times obituary of Dr. Goodall ran in the print edition on 2 October 2025.  It was posted to the website as “Jane Goodall, Who Chronicled the Social Lives of Chimps, Dies at 91” on 1 October 2025 and updated on 2 October.]

Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday [1 October] in Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C. When not traveling widely, she lived in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, in her childhood home.

Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when National Geographic magazine published her 7,500-word, 37-page account [“My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees,” National Geographic Magazine, vol. 124, no. 2, Aug. 1963] of the lives of primates she had observed in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania [then Tanganyika (until 1964)]. The National Geographic Society had been financially supporting her field studies there.

The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick [1937-2002], a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married [1964], also described Dr. Goodall’s struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.

On the scientific merits alone, her discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould [1941-2002], the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.”

On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey [1903-72], the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Long before focus groups, message discipline and communications plans became crucial tools in advancing high-profile careers and alerting the world to significant discoveries in and outside of science, Dr. Goodall understood the benefits of being the principal narrator and star of her own story of discovery.

In articles and books, her lucid prose carried vivid descriptions, some lighthearted, of the numerous perils she encountered in the African rainforest — malaria, leopards, crocodiles, spitting cobras and deadly giant centipedes, to name a few. Her writing gained its widest attention in three more long articles in National Geographic in the 1960s and ’70s and in three well-received books, “My Friends, the Wild Chimpanzees” (1967), “In the Shadow of Man” (1971) and “Through a Window” (1990).

Dr. Goodall’s willingness to challenge scientific convention and shape the details of her research into a riveting adventure narrative about two primary subjects — the chimps and herself — turned her into a household name, in no small part thanks to the power of television.

Dr. Goodall’s gentle, knowledgeable demeanor and telegenic presence — set against the beautiful yet dangerous Gombe preserve and its playful and unpredictable primates — proved irresistible to the broadcast networks. In December 1965, CBS News aired a documentary of her work in prime time [“Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees,” National Geographic Specials, 22 Dec. 1965], the first in a long string of nationally and internationally televised special reports about the chimpanzees of Gombe and the courageous woman steadfastly chronicling what she called their “rich emotional life.”

In becoming one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, Dr. Goodall also opened the door for more women in her largely male field as well as across all of science. Women, including Dian Fossey [1932-85; known for her study of the mountain gorilla], Biruté Galdikas [b. 1946; leading authority on orangutans], Cheryl Knott [b. ca. 1964; biological anthropologist; research focused on orangutan behavior and biology] and Penny Patterson [b. 1947; animal psychologist and developmental psychologist; co-founder of The Gorilla Foundation], came to dominate the field of primate behavior research.

Most of Dr. Goodall’s observations focused on several generations of a troop of 30 to 40 chimpanzees, the species genetically closest to humans. She named some of them — Flo, Fifi, David Greybeard — and grew to know each of them personally. She was particularly interested in their courtship, mating rituals, births and parenting.

Dr. Goodall was the first scientist to explain to the world that chimpanzee mothers are capable of giving birth only once every four and a half to six years, and that only one or two babies were produced each year by the Gombe Stream troop. She found that first-time mothers generally hid their babies from the adult males, prompting frantic displays by the males — leaping and hooting that could last five minutes. An experienced mother, however, she discovered, freely allowed males and other females to view her infant, satisfying their curiosity, in a far calmer introduction.

In her many articles, books and documentaries, Dr. Goodall explored similar signal moments in her own life. In March 1964, after a nearly yearlong courtship, she married Mr. van Lawick. Three years later, she gave birth to Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick [b. 1967], her only child, whom she nicknamed Grub.

But even there she drew connections to her work in the field. She explained that her parenting philosophy and strategy were based on skills and values that she had learned from the chimpanzees, particularly the sure-handed matriarch of the troop, whom she named Flo. Nevertheless, she kept Grub in a protective cage while she was in the forest with him: She feared that he might be killed and eaten by the chimps.

Dr. Goodall’s ability to weave scientific observation with the story of her own life produced a powerful drama filled with characters of all ages, sexes and species. She once told a scientific meeting that her work would have had far less resonance scientifically or emotionally if she had just referred to the proud and confident chimp known as David Greybeard by a number, as was the usual practice. [Goodall gives a brief explanation of this remark in her piece below.]

In the 1970s, Dr. Goodall began to spend less time observing chimpanzees and far more time seeking to protect them and their disappearing habitat. She made known her opposition to capturing wild chimpanzees for display in zoos or for medical research. And she traveled the world, drawing large audiences with a message of hope and confidence that the world would recognize the importance of preserving its natural resources.

The 1970s were also a period of upheaval in her personal life. In 1974, she divorced Mr. van Lawick and soon afterward married Derek Bryceson [1922-80; m. 1975], the director of national parks in Tanzania. He died of cancer in 1980, a time she later said was perhaps the most difficult of her life.

She established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. It evolved into one of the world’s largest nonprofit global research and conservation organizations, with offices in the United States and 24 other nations. Its Roots and Shoots program, launched in 1991, teaches young people about conservation in 75 countries.

In honor of her work, Tanzania in 1978 designated the Gombe Stream Reserve a national park. Dr. Goodall’s institute maintains a research station there that attracts students and scientists from around the world. In 2002, the United Nations named Dr. Goodall a Messenger of Peace, the U.N.’s highest honor for global citizenship.

Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born in London on April 4, 1934, and grew up in Bournemouth as the older of two girls of Margaret Myfanwe (Joseph) Goodall [1906-2000)], who was known as Vanne, and Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall [1907-2001]. [Myfanwe, a Welsh name, is pronounced muh-VAN-wee; Vanne is a known nickname derived from Myfanwe.]

Her mother was an author and novelist who wrote under the name Vanne Morris-Goodall. Her father was an engineer who raced cars for a time. The couple divorced after World War II. Vanne Goodall accompanied her daughter to the Gombe reserve at the start of Dr. Goodall’s famous study in 1960 and was a leading character in much of her daughter’s writing. [British authorities in Tanganyika had insisted Dr. Goodall have a companion with her in Gombe, so her 54-year-old mother went along.]

As a little girl, Jane adored Tarzan’s Jane, Dr. Doolittle and a little stuffed monkey doll, a gift from her father that she named Jubilee. [Smithsonian magazine reported that Goodall “often joked that Tarzan had married the wrong Jane.”] Indeed, in her public appearances, Dr. Goodall almost always described her scientific findings and her international renown as a fortunate convergence of her childhood love of animals and Africa with her inquisitive and adventurous nature.

[Goodall recounts the story of a time when she was about 4 and disappeared to a henhouse for hours to discover how chickens laid their eggs. She hid herself and remained still and quiet until a hen arrived, made a nest, and laid her egg right before little Jane. Then she ran home, unaware that her family had reported her missing to the police, and excitedly told her mother what she’d seen and learned. Goodall records that her mother sat down and listened to her tale of wonder and never scolded her for making her parents worry.]

In 1956, after finishing a course in secretarial school and taking several jobs in London, she received a letter from a friend whose family owned a farm near Nairobi, Kenya. The friend invited her to join her.

Dr. Goodall jumped at the opportunity. Booking passage on a freighter to Africa, she arrived in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, on her 23rd birthday. She was soon introduced to other expatriate Englishmen and women in Nairobi as well as to Dr. Leakey, at the time a prominent but not yet internationally renowned archaeologist.

[The territories of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar were all longtime colonies or protectorates of the British Empire in the 1950s and early 1960s, when Goodall was first in Africa. Kenya gained its independence in 1963 and became the Republic of Kenya in 1964. Tanganyika became independent in 1961, declaring itself a republic in 1962. The archipelago of Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanganyika, was granted independence in 1963 and became a constitutional monarchy within the Commonwealth under its sultan. In 1964, however, Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged and formed the United Republic of Tanzania.]

Seven weeks after her arrival, she began work as Dr. Leakey’s secretary and assistant. Dr. Goodall accompanied him that summer to the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, a three-day trip over trackless wilderness, where he was in the early phases of excavating early human remains. He often talked about his interest in stationing a researcher on Lake Tanganyika to study a troop of wild chimpanzees that lived there.

[The Olduvai Gorge, located in northern Tanzania, is one of the world’s most important paleoanthropological sites. Often called the “Cradle of Mankind,” the steep-sided ravine, approximately 30 miles (48 kilometers) long and up to 295 feet (90 meters) deep, holds some of the earliest evidence of human ancestors.

[The first excavations at Olduvai were in 1913, but the site’s most famous for the groundbreaking discoveries made by the paleoanthropologist team of Louis and Mary Leakey. Their excavations led to findings that reshaped our understanding of human origins.  They worked the site from 1931 to Louis Leakey’s death in 1972, then Mary Leakey (1913-96) carried on until 1983.]

Those discussions led to an agreement with Dr. Goodall that she would take on that mission. On July 14, 1960, accompanied by her mother, she arrived at Gombe, and three months later, she watched as the big, handsome adult male chimp she named David Greybeard did something no human had ever expected of an animal.

“He was squatting beside the red earth mound of a termite nest, and as I watched I saw him carefully push a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound,” she wrote. “After a moment he withdrew it and picked something from the end of it with his mouth. It was obvious that he was actually using a grass stem as a tool.” [See excerpt below.]

Recognizing the contributions she was making to science, the University of Cambridge accepted her into its doctoral program in 1961 without an undergraduate degree. She was awarded her doctorate in 1965.

Dr. Goodall wrote 32 books, 15 of them for children. In her last book, “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” (2021, with Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson), she wrote of her optimism about the future of humankind.

It was a message she continued to spread in her frequent public speaking engagements around the world, traveling some 300 days a year into her last decades, according to her institute. When she died on Wednesday, she had been scheduled to speak to students in Pasadena, Calif., and to participate in a tree-planting ceremony in an area that had been ravaged by wildfires.

Her many awards include the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, presented in 1995, and the Templeton Prize, given in 2021. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II named her a dame of the British Empire. In January, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

[The Hubbard Medal is awarded by NGS for distinction in exploration, discovery, and research. The Templeton Prize, administered by the John Templeton Foundation, is an annual award granted to a living person, in the estimation of the judges, “whose exemplary achievements advance Sir John Templeton's philanthropic vision: harnessing the power of the sciences to explore the deepest questions of the universe and humankind's place and purpose within it.”

[In the 1995 New Year Honours, Goodall was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) “for services to zoology,” and in the 2003 Birthday Honours, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the same Order (DBE) “for services to the environment and conservation.” The DBE is the highest rank of the order for women and allows her to be addressed as Dame Jane Goodall; the investiture was held at Buckingham Palace in 2004.]

She is survived by her son; her sister, Judy Waters; and three grandchildren.

In July 2022, Mattel released a Jane Goodall doll as part of its Barbie-branded Inspiring Women series. The doll, with blond hair and dressed in a tan field shirt and shorts, is made of recycled plastic. It honored the 62nd anniversary of Dr. Goodall’s first visit to the Gombe reserve.

“Since young girls began reading about my early life and my career with the chimps, many, many, many of them have told me that they went into conservation or animal behavior because of me,” Ms. Goodall once said in a CBS News interview. “I sincerely hope that it will help to create more interest and fascination in the natural world.”

[The interview with Jane Goodall was part of a segment on The Uplift, a weekly CBS News show that spotlights stories that inspire, motivate, and tug at your heartstrings, that aired on 12 July 2022. The interview was broadcast to coincide with the launch of the Dr. Jane Goodall Inspiring Women Barbie doll, which was announced by Mattel on the same date. The doll was released just before World Chimpanzee Day on 14 July 2022.]

Ash Wu contributed reporting.

[Keith Schneider, a nationally known environmental journalist and a former national correspondent for the New York Times, is senior editor and a columnist for Circle of Blue, a nonprofit news, information, and convening organization reporting on fresh water worldwide.  His work has additionally appeared in Mongabay, a conservation news web portal that reports on environmental science, energy, and green design; The Guardian; and elsewhere.]

*  *  *  *
“FIRST OBSERVATIONS”
by Jane van Lawick-Goodall 

[This excerpt from Goodall’s first book is Chapter 3 of In the Shadow of Man (Houghton, 1971).]

For about a month I spent most of each day either on the Peak or overlooking Mlinda Valley where the chimps, before or after stuffing themselves with figs, ate large quantities of small purple fruits that tasted, like so many of their foods, as bitter and astringent as sloes or crab apples.  Piece by piece, I began to form my first somewhat crude picture of chimpanzee life.

The impression that I had gained when I watched the chimps at the msulula tree of temporary, constantly changing associations of individuals within the community was substantiated.  Most often I saw small groups of four to eight moving about together.  Sometimes I saw one or two chimpanzees leave such a group and wander off on their own or join up with a different association.  On other occasions, I watched two or three small groups joining to form a larger one.

Often, as one group crossed the grassy ridge separating the Kasekela Valley from the fig trees in the home valley, the male chimpanzee, or chimpanzees, of the party would break into a run, sometimes moving in an upright position, sometimes dragging a fallen branch, sometimes stamping or slapping the hard earth.  These charging displays were always accompanied by loud pant-hoots and afterward the chimpanzee frequently would swing up into a tree overlooking the valley he was about to enter and sit quietly, peering down and obviously listening for a response from below.  If there were chimps feeding in the fig trees they nearly always hooted back, as though in answer.  Then the new arrivals would hurry down the steep slope and, with more calling and screaming, the two groups would meet in the fig trees.  When groups of females and youngsters with no males present joined other feeding chimpanzees, usually there was none of this excitement; the newcomers merely climbed up into the trees, greeted some of those already there, and began to stuff themselves with figs.

While many details of their social behavior were hidden from me by the foliage, I did get occasional fascinating glimpses.  I saw one female, newly arrived in a group, hurry up to a big male and hold her hand toward him.  Almost regally he reached out, clasped her hand in his, drew it toward him, and kissed it with his lips.  I saw two adult males embrace each other in greeting.  I saw youngsters having wild games through the treetops, chasing around after each other or jumping again and again, one after the other, from a branch to a springy bough below.  I watched small infants dangling happily by themselves for minutes on end, patting at their toes with one hand, rotating gently from side to side.  Once two tiny infants pulled on opposite ends of a twig in a gentle tug-of war.  Often, during the heat of midday or after a long spell of feeding, I saw two or more adults grooming each other, carefully looking through the hair of their companions.

At that time of year the chimps usually went to bed late, making their nests when it was too dark to see properly through binoculars, but sometimes they nested earlier and I could watch them from the Peak.  I found that every individual, except for infants who slept with their mothers, made his own nest each night.  Generally this took about three minutes: the chimp chose a firm foundation such as an upright fork or crotch, or two horizontal branches.  Then he reached out and bent over smaller branches onto this foundation, keeping each one in place with his feet.  Finally he tucked in the small leafy twigs growing around the rim of his nest and lay down.  Quite often a chimp sat up after a few minutes and picked a handful of leafy twigs, which he put under his head or some other part of his body before settling down again for the night.  One young female I watched went on and on bending down branches until she had constructed a huge mound of greenery on which she finally curled up.

I climbed up into some of the nests after the chimpanzees had left them.  Most of them were built in trees that for me were almost impossible to climb.  I found that there was quite complicated interweaving of the branches in some of them.  I found, too, that the nests were never fouled with dung; and later, when I was able to get closer to the chimps, I saw how they were always careful to defecate and urinate over the edge of their nests, even in the middle of the night.  During that month I really came to know the country well, for I often went on expeditions from the Peak, sometimes to examine nests, more frequently to collect specimens of the chimpanzees’ food plants, which Bernard Verdcourt [1925-2011; biologist and taxonomist, most widely known as a botanist; before 1964, his best-known work probably consists of his many studies of the East African flora] had kindly offered to identify for me.  Soon I could find my way around the sheer ravines and up and down the steep slopes of three valleys – the home valley, the Pocket, and Mlinda Valley – as well as a taxi driver finds his way about in the main streets and byways of London.  It is a period I remember vividly, not only because I was beginning to accomplish something at last, but also because of the delight I felt in being completely by myself.  For those who love to be alone with nature I need add nothing further; for those who do not, no words of mine could ever convey, even in part, the almost mystical awareness of beauty and eternity that accompanies certain treasured moments.  And, though the beauty was always there, those moments came upon me unaware: when I was watching the pale flush preceding dawn; or looking up through the rustling leaves of some giant forest tree into the greens and browns and black shadows that occasionally ensnared a bright fleck of the blue sky; or when I stood, as darkness fell, with one hand on the still-warm trunk of a tree and looked at the sparkling of an early moon on the never still, sighing water of the lake.

One day, when I was sitting by the trickle of water in Buffalo Wood, pausing for a moment in the coolness before returning from a scramble in Mlinda Valley, I saw a female bushbuck [a common name for one of several African antelopes] moving slowly along the nearly dry streambed.  Occasionally she paused to pick off some plant and crunch it.  I kept absolutely still, and she was not aware of my presence until she was little more than ten yards away.  Suddenly she tensed and stood staring at me, one small forefoot raised.  Because I did not move, she did not know what I was – only that my outline was somehow strange.  I saw her velvet nostrils dilate as she sniffed the air, but I was downwind and her nose gave her no answer.  Slowly she came closer, and closer – one step at a time, her neck craned forward – always poised for instant flight.  I can still scarcely believe that her nose actually touched my knee; yet if I close my eyes I can feel again, in imagination, the warmth of her breath and the silken impact of her skin.  Unexpectedly I blinked and she was gone in a flash, bounding away with loud barks of alarm until the vegetation hid her completely from my view.

It was rather different when, as I was sitting on the Peak, I saw a leopard coming toward me, his tail held up straight.  He was at a slightly lower level than I, and obviously had no idea I was there.  Ever since arrival in Africa I had had an ingrained, illogical fear of leopards.  Already, while working at the Gombe, I had several times nearly turned back when, crawling through some thick undergrowth, I had suddenly smelled the rank smell of cat.  I had forced myself on, telling myself that my fear was foolish, that only wounded leopards charged humans with savage ferocity.

On this occasion, though, the leopard went out of sight as it started to climb up the hill – the hill on the peak of which I sat.  I quickly hastened to climb a tree, but halfway there I realized that leopards can climb trees.  So I uttered a sort of halfhearted squawk.  The leopard, my logical mind told me, would be just as frightened of me if he knew I was there.  Sure enough, there was a thudding of startled feet and then silence.  I returned to the Peak, but the feeling of unseen eyes watching me was too much.  I decided to watch for the chimps in Mlinda Valley.  And, when I returned to the Peak several hours later, there, on the very rock which had been my seat, was a neat pile of leopard dung.  He must have watched me go and then, very carefully, examined the place where such a frightening creature had been and tried to exterminate my alien scent with his own.

As the weeks went by the chimpanzees became less and less afraid.  Quite often when I was on one of my food-collecting expeditions I came across chimpanzees unexpectedly, and after a time I found that some of them would tolerate my presence provided they were in fairly thick forest and I sat still and did not try to move closer than sixty to eighty yards.  And so, during my second month of watching from the Peak, when I saw a group settle down to feed I sometimes moved closer and was thus able to make more detailed observations.

It was at this time that I began to recognize a number of different individuals.  As soon as I was sure of knowing a chimpanzee if I saw it again, I named it.  Some scientists feel that animals should be labeled by numbers – that to name them is anthropomorphic – but I have always been interested in the differences between individuals, and a name is not only more individual than a number but also far easier to remember.  Most names were simply those which, for some reason or other, seemed to suit the individuals to whom I attached them.  A few chimps were named because some facial expression or mannerism reminded me of human acquaintances.

The easiest individual to recognize was old Mr. McGregor.  The crown of his head, his neck, and his shoulders were almost entirely devoid of hair, but a slight frill remained around his head rather like a monk’s tonsure.  He was an old male – perhaps between thirty and forty years of age (chimpanzees in captivity can live more than fifty years).  During the early months of my acquaintance with him, Mr. McGregor was somewhat belligerent.  If I accidentally came across him at close quarters he would threaten me with an upward and backward jerk of his head and a shaking of branches before climbing down and vanishing from my sight.  He reminded me, for some reason, of Beatrix Potter’s old gardener in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

[The average lifespan of a wild chimpanzee is relatively short, though captive chimpanzees tend to live longer than most wild ones, with median lifespans of 31.7 years for males and 38.7 years for females. Wild chimps usually live less than 15 years, although individuals that reach 12 years may live an additional 15 years. On rare occasions, wild chimpanzees may live nearly 60 years.]

Ancient Flo with her deformed, bulbous nose and ragged ears was equally easy to recognize.  Her youngest offspring at that time were two-year-old Fifi, who still rode everywhere on her mother’s back, and her juvenile son, Figan, who was always to be seen wandering around with his mother and little sister.  He was then about seven years old; it was approximately a year before he would attain puberty.  Flo often traveled with another old mother, Olly.  Olly’s long face was also distinctive; the fluff of hair on the back of her head – though no other feature – reminded me of my aunt, Olwen.  Olly, like Flo, was accompanied by two children, a daughter younger than Fifi, and an adolescent son about a year older than Figan.

Then there was William, who, I am certain, must have been Olly’s blood brother.  I never saw any special signs of friendship between them, but their faces were amazingly alike.  They both had long upper lips that wobbled when they suddenly turned their heads.  William had the added distinction of several thin, deeply etched scar marks running down his upper lip from his nose.

Two of the other chimpanzees I knew well by sight at that time were David Greybeard and Goliath.  Like David and Goliath in the Bible, these two individuals were closely associated in my mind because they were very often together.  Goliath, even in those days of his prime, was not a giant, but he had a splendid physique and the springy movements of an athlete.  He probably weighed about one hundred pounds.  David Graybeard was less afraid of me from the start than were any of the other chimps I was always pleased when I picked out his handsome face and well-marked silvery beard in a chimpanzee group, for with David to calm the others, I had a better chance of approaching to observe them more closely.

Before the end of my trial period in the field I made two really exciting discoveries – discoveries that made the previous months of frustration well worth while.  And for both of them I had David Graybeard to thank.

One day I arrived on the Peak and found a small group of chimps just below me in the upper branches of a thick tree.  As I watched I saw that one of them was holding a pink-looking object from which he was from time to time pulling pieces with his teeth.  There was a female and a youngster and they were both reaching out toward the male, their hands actually touching his mouth.  Presently the female picked up a piece of the pink thing and put it to her mouth: it was at this moment that I realized the chimps were eating meat.

After each bite of meat the male picked off some leaves with his lips and chewed them with the flesh.  Often, when he had chewed for several minutes on this leafy wad, he spat out the remains into the waiting hands of the female.  Suddenly he dropped a small piece of meat, and like a flash the youngster swung after it to the ground.  Even as he reached to pick it up the undergrowth exploded and an adult bushpig [member of the pig family that inhabits forests, woodland, riverine vegetation, and cultivated areas in East and Southern Africa.] charged toward him.  Screaming, the juvenile leaped back into the tree.  The pig remained in the open, snorting and moving backward and forward.  Soon I made out the shapes of three small striped piglets.  Obviously the chimps were eating a baby pig.  The size was right and later, when I realized that the male was David Graybeard, I moved closer and saw that he was indeed eating a piglet.

For three hours I watched the chimps feeding.  David occasionally let the female bite pieces from the carcass and once he actually detached a small piece of flesh and placed it in her outstretched hand.  When he finally climbed down there was still meat left on the carcass; he carried it away in one hand, followed by the others.

Of course I was not sure, then, that David Graybeard had caught the pig himself, but even so, it was tremendously exciting to know that these chimpanzees actually ate meat.  Previously scientists had believed that although these apes might occasionally supplement their diet with a few insects or small rodents and the like they were primarily vegetarians and fruit eaters.  No one had suspected that they might hunt larger mammals.

It was within two weeks of this observation that I saw something that excited me even more.  By then it was October and the short rains had begun.  The blackened slopes were softened by feathery new grass shoots and in some places the ground was carpeted by a variety of flowers.  The Chimpanzees’ Spring, I called it.  I had had a frustrating morning, tramping up and down three valleys with never a sign or sound of a chimpanzee.  Hauling myself up the steep slope of Mlinda Valley I headed for the Peak, not only weary but soaking wet from crawling through dense undergrowth.  Suddenly I stopped, for I saw a slight movement in the long grass about sixty yards away.  Quickly focusing my binoculars I saw that it was a single chimpanzee, and just then he turned in my direction.  I recognized David Graybeard.

Cautiously I moved around so that I could see what he was doing.  He was squatting beside the red earth mound of a termite nest, and as I watched I saw him carefully push a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound.  After a moment he withdrew it and picked something from the end with his mouth.  I was too far away to make out what he was eating, but it was obvious that he was actually using a grass stem as a tool.

I knew that on two occasions casual observers in West Africa had seen chimpanzees using objects as tools: one had broken open palm-nut kernels by using a rock as a hammer, and a group of chimps had been observed pushing sticks into an underground bee’s nest and licking off the honey.  Somehow I had never dreamed of seeing anything so exciting myself.

For an hour David feasted at the termite mound and then he wandered slowly away.  When I was sure he had gone I went over to examine the mound.  I found a few crushed insects strewn about, and a swarm of worker termites sealing the entrances of the nest passages into which David had obviously been poking his stems.  I picked up one of his discarded tools and carefully pushed it into a hole myself.  Immediately I felt the pull of several termites as they seized the grass, and when I pulled it out there were a number of worker termites and a few soldiers, with big red heads, clinging on with their mandibles.  There they remained, sticking out at right angles to the stem with their legs waving in the air.

Before I left I trampled down some of the tall dry grass and constructed a rough hide – just a few palm fronds leaned up against the low branch of a tree and tied together at the top.  I planned to wait there the next day.  But it was another week before I was able to watch a chimpanzee “fishing” for termites again.  Twice chimps arrived, but each time they saw me and moved off immediately.  Once a swarm of fertile winged termites – the princes and princesses, as they are called – flew off on their nuptial flight, their huge white wings fluttering frantically as they carried the insects higher and higher.  Later I realized that it is at this time of year, during the short rains, when the worker termites extend the passages of the nest to the surface, preparing for these emigrations.  Several such swarms emerge between October and January.  It is primarily during these months that the chimpanzees feed on termites.

On the eighth day of my watch David Graybeard arrived again, together with Goliath, and the pair worked there for two hours.  I could see much better: I observed how they scratched open the sealed-over passage entrances with a thumb or forefinger.  I watched how they bit the ends off their tools when they became bent, or used the other end, or discarded them in favor of new ones.  Goliath once moved at least fifteen yards from the heap to select a firm-looking piece of vine, and both males often picked three or four stems while they were collecting tools, and put the spares beside them on the ground until they wanted them.

Most exciting of all, on several occasions they picked small leafy twigs and prepared them for use by stripping off the leaves.  This was the first recorded example of a wild animal not merely using an object as a tool, but actually modifying an object and thus showing the crude beginnings of toolmaking.

Previously man had been regarded as the only tool-making animal.  Indeed, one of the clauses commonly accepted in the definition of man was that he was a creature who “made tools to a regular and set pattern.”  The chimpanzees, obviously, had not made tools to any set pattern.  Nevertheless, my early observations of their primitive toolmaking abilities convinced a number of scientists that it was necessary to redefine man in a more complex manner than before.  Or else, as Louis Leakey put it, we should by definition have to accept the chimpanzee as Man.

[Among those chimpanzees whom Goodall named during her years in Gombe were:

   •   David Greybeard, a grey-chinned male who first warmed up to Goodall
•   Flo, a motherly, high-ranking female with a bulbous nose and ragged ears, and her children; Figan, Faben, Freud, Fifi, and Flint
•   Frodo, Fifi's second-oldest child, an aggressive male who also attacked humans, including Goodall
•   Goliath, a friend of David Greybeard, originally the alpha male named for his bold nature
•   Humphrey, a big, strong, bullying male
•   Mike, who through his cunning and improvisation displaced Goliath as the alpha male
•   Mr. McGregor, a belligerent older male
•   Gigi, a large, sterile female who delighted in being the "aunt" of any young chimps or humans

[There was also one thing that Goodall showed—not in this excerpt—that was not a revelation to me, however.  She discovered that each chimp has a specific, individual. personality.  How could you have a pet, say a dog, and not see a distinct personality?  If you've had more than one dog, for instance, it's soon obvious that one dog has a different personality than the other.

[Another essay from that writing course that changed my understanding of non-human animals was Carl Sagan's "The Abstraction of Beasts" (Chap. 5 of his 1977 book, The Dragons of Eden).  It's about the notion that, despite the common belief, animals can reason, and the implications of that notion.  I’m going to post that as a companion to Jane Goodall’s piece in this post.  Give it a read after Wednesday, 8 October.]