Panbanisha, a bonobo at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, uses a computer monitor with more than 400 lexigrams, to speak to Liz Pugh, a researcher at the center.
After spending much of the day with Panbanisha’s brother, Kanzi and his 10-month-old son Teco, and scientist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Liz told me Panbanisha wanted to meet me. I watched through glass as she asked Liz for grapes and peanuts and shared a secret.
A video interview with Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh – one of this year’s TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people — can be seen here:
Their brains are large enough to handle language but they can’t speak, not sure why. Amazing what they are able to understand though.
Dad
As Dr. Sue says, they’re vocalizing quite a bit, and they can understand one another, with what sound to us like high-pitched squeals. But their laryngial tracts are not like ours, so they can’t speak our language in a way that we can comprehend it. But they can form complex sentences through the 400 or so lexigram images on the touch screens and laminated printouts in the lab.