There are also geniuses among chimpanzees. In the animal world: culture, education, emotions

". Let me tell you how it really happened.

The honor of “first contact”—a conversation between representatives of different species—goes to the chimpanzee Washoe and her caregivers, husband and wife Allen and Beatrice Gardner. By that time, it was already known that animals are capable of thinking: they can solve problems “in their minds,” that is, not only by trial and error, but also by inventing new behavior options.

This was proven by the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, who conducted his famous studies chimpanzee intelligence at the beginning of the twentieth century. In one of his experiments, a monkey after a series unsuccessful attempts knock down a high-hanging banana with a stick or get it by climbing on a box, sit down, “think,” and then get up, put the boxes one on top of the other, climb on them with a stick and knock down the target.

These experiments inspired scientists to make their first attempts to “humanize” monkeys. In the 1930s, the psychologist couple Kellogg adopted a baby chimpanzee named Gua, who grew up with their one-year-old son Donald. Parents tried not to make differences between “children” and communicate with them equally.

True, achieve special success They were unsuccessful in raising Gua, but Donald began to become an ape: the development of his speech slowed down, but he learned to perfectly imitate Gua’s cries and habits and even began to gnaw bark from trees after him. The frightened parents had to stop the experiment, Gua was sent to the zoo. Another pair of psychologists, the Hayes couple, who raised the chimpanzee Vicky, with great difficulty, managed to teach her to pronounce a few words: “mom”, “dad”, “cup”.

Only in 1966, ethologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner, watching films about Vicki, noticed that she wanted and could communicate using signs: for example, she really loved to ride in a car and, in order to communicate her desire to people, she came up with the idea of ​​​​bringing them images cars that I tore out of magazines. What made her unable to speak was not a lack of intelligence, but the structure of her larynx. And then the Gardners came up with the idea of ​​teaching chimpanzees sign language, which is used by the deaf and dumb.

Thus began the Washoe Project.

Washoe and her family

The future first lady of the world chimpanzee was a 10-month-old baby caught in Africa: it was originally intended to be used in space research- apparently, she was simply born for fame.

The Gardners raised Washoe as own child. She not only remembered the gestures with which her adoptive parents addressed her, but also asked questions, commented on her own actions and the actions of her teachers, and spoke to them herself.

Her first “word” was the sign “more!”: tickle more, hug, treat, or introduce new words. During the first year of living with the Gardners, Washoe mastered 30 signs-words of Amslen - the American language of the deaf and dumb, and in the first three years - 130 signs. Mastering language in the same sequence as the child, she learned to combine signs into simple sentences. For example, Washoe pesters one of the researchers to give her the cigarette that he was smoking: the signs “give me smoke”, “smoke Washoe”, “quickly give me smoke” follow. Finally the researcher said, “Ask nicely,” to which Washoe responded, “Please give me that hot smoke.” However, they never gave her a cigarette.

Chimpanzees also easily acquired such seemingly purely human skills as joking, deceiving, and even swearing. She called one of the servants, who did not let her drink for a long time, “dirty Jack.” But swearing is not at all such a primitive thing, since it speaks of Washoe’s ability to use words in figuratively, summarize their meanings. It is on this ability to generalize with the help of words that human intelligence is built.

It turned out that Washoe builds generalizations no worse than small children who are beginning to master a language do. For example, one of the first signs she learned was “open!” - she first used it when she wanted the door of a room to be opened for her, then she began to use it to open all doors, then for boxes, containers, bottles, and finally even to open the water tap.

The monkey correctly used personal pronouns, ideas about the past and future (in the future she was mainly interested in holidays, such as Christmas, which she loved very much), word order in sentences (for example, she perfectly understood the difference between “You tickle me” and “I tickle you”) "). Sometimes Washoe tried to “speak” not only to people, but also to other creatures. One day, when a dog was chasing the car in which she was traveling, barking, Washoe, who was deathly afraid of dogs, instead of hiding as usual, leaned out of the window and began to desperately gesticulate: “Dog, go away!”

Meanwhile, several other newly born chimpanzees were brought to the Gardner laboratory. They learned quickly and soon began communicating with each other in sign language. And when Washoe’s baby was born, he began to learn gestures, no longer watching people, but other monkeys. At the same time, researchers have more than once noticed how Washoe “puts his hand on him” - corrects the gesture-symbol.

In April 1967, Washoe used word compounds for the first time. She asked “give me something sweet” and “go open it.” At this time, the chimpanzee was at the age when human children first begin to use two-word combinations. Comparison of the abilities of humans and monkeys was the next direction of research. But this aspect also brought some trouble for the Gardners. The fact is that at first some of the scientists did not recognize Washoe’s ability to speak. Roger Brown, professor Harvard University, known for his studies of early language development in children, believed that Washoe did not always strictly adhere to the correct word order and, therefore, did not understand the connections between different categories of words that give a certain meaning to a sentence. Jacob Bronowski and linguist Ursula Bellugi published a scathing article arguing that Washoe could not speak because she never asked questions or used negative sentences. Finally, linguist Nom Chomsky categorically stated that the chimpanzee brain is not designed for an animal to speak.

Research, meanwhile, produced more and more new results, which the Gardners analyzed and carefully compared with existing data on speech development in children. And critics were soon forced to withdraw some of their objections

Roger Brown recognized that word order does not matter. In some languages, such as Finnish, it is not as important as in English. The placement of words in a sentence does not matter big role and in sign language ASL. And children themselves often violate the order of words, but... they understand each other perfectly.

The Gardners concluded that children and monkeys are very similar when it comes to answering questions, constructing binary sentences, using nouns, verbs and adjectives, and word order in sentences. Unfamiliar with grammatical rules, children, like chimpanzees, tend to replace entire sentences with one or two words.

The test showed that Washoe freely asks questions and uses negative sentences. The monkey is able to use the signs “no,” “I can’t,” and “that’s enough.” Washoe eagerly leafed through illustrated magazines, asking people, “What is this?” Chomsky's statements about disabilities chimpanzee brains are simply not testable: there are still no methods that would allow us to clarify this issue. Only recently, the American scientist Norman Geschwind began experiments to determine whether there is an area in the chimpanzee brain similar to the one that regulates speech activity in humans.

When the Gardners finished their work with Washoe in 1970, she was in danger of going to one of the biomedical centers “for experiments” and, if not dying, then at least spending the rest of her days in a small solitary cell. She, and then other chimpanzees who were trained in the laboratory, were saved by the Gardners’ assistant Roger Fouts, who created the “Monkey Farm”, where the “Washoe family” now lives - a colony of “talking” monkeys.

Gorilla Professor

The results of research on the “Washoe family” seemed completely incredible, but in the 70s several groups of independent researchers working with different types great apes, confirmed and supplemented these data. Perhaps the most capable of all 25 “talking” monkeys was the gorilla Koko, who lives near San Francisco. Coco is a real professor: she uses, according to various estimates, from 500 to a thousand Amslen signs, and is able to understand about 2000 more signs and words English language and, when solving tests, shows an IQ that corresponds to the norm for an adult American.

However, like other “talking” monkeys, the main development of its speech and intelligence occurred in the first years of life (as a rule, talented monkeys reach the level of a two-year-old child in speech development, and in some respects, a three-year-old child). Growing up, they remain in many ways like children, reacting childishly to life situations and prefer games to all other ways of spending time. Coco still plays with dolls and toy animals and talks to them, although she gets embarrassed when someone catches her doing this.

For example, Coco acts out an imaginary situation between two toy gorillas. Having placed the toys in front of him, the monkey gestures: “bad, bad” towards the pink gorilla, and then “kiss!” towards the blue one. And when her gorilla partner Michael tore the leg off her rag doll, Coco burst out with the most terrible curse ever heard from a monkey: “You dirty bad toilet!”

Coco loves cats very much (she had her own cat, which recently died), and loves to draw. Koko's drawings can be viewed on her website http://www.koko.org/index.php, where you can also find out latest news from the life of a gorilla, who is already approaching forty (chimpanzees and gorillas can live up to 45-50 years).

Now scientists want to bring the “humanization” of Coco to new level- they are going to teach her to read.

Trained animals or brothers in mind?

However, the conclusions from these studies turned out to be too scandalous and completely unacceptable for most of the scientific community. On the one hand, “talking” monkeys turned out to be the fly in the ointment of the reasoning of philosophers and psychologists about the gap between a person with consciousness and animals, like automata, controlled by reflexes and instincts.

On the other hand, linguists attacked: according to the dominant concept in American linguistic knowledge, Noam Chomskyan language- this is a manifestation of a genetic ability that is characteristic only of humans (by the way, in mockery one of the “talking” monkeys was called Nim Chimsky).

According to critics, the monkeys' gestures are not meaningful signs, but simple imitation of researchers, at best " conditioned reflexes", acquired as a result of training. Experimenters, when talking to monkeys, allegedly give them hints all the time, without realizing it themselves - with facial expressions, gaze, intonation, and the monkeys are guided not by their words, but by non-verbal information.

The “talking” monkeys were compared to Clever Hans, the Oryol trotter, whose owner “taught” the horse to count and answer questions. Then it turned out that Hans was simply reacting to the subtle movements of his trainer.

Among the skeptics was researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. She decided to refute the idea of ​​“talking” monkeys. A series of studies began in which dwarf shim-pan-ze-bonobos communicated with scientists via a computer in a specially developed artificial language - Yerkish. Instead of gestures, he was taught to use a special computer keyboard with conventional keys-icons, which represented words. When you pressed a key, the word was displayed on the monitor as a picture. Thus, it is convenient to conduct a dialogue, correct or supplement remarks. But Kanzi besides this without special education recognized about 150 words. His guardian, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, just talked to him like that.

One of Rambeau's goals was to reward the monkeys as little as possible for correct answers. The adult monkeys Savage-Rumbaugh worked with showed little talent and only deepened her skepticism. But at one fine moment, little Kanzi, the son of one of these monkeys, who was always hovering around his mother, suddenly began to own initiative be responsible for her. Until that moment, no one had taught him anything, researchers did not pay attention to him at all special attention, but he answered brilliantly.

It soon became clear that he had just as spontaneously learned to understand English, and in addition showed considerable talent for computer games. Gradually, thanks to the successes of Kanzi and his sister Bonbonisha, Savage-Rumbaugh’s skepticism disappeared and she began to show scientific world evidence that her "talking" chimpanzees know three languages ​​(Yerkisch, Amslen and about 2000 English words), understand the meaning of words and the syntax of sentences, are capable of generalization and metaphor, talk to each other and learn from each other.

According to the scientist, monkeys often guess the intentions of the speaker, even without understanding the meaning of the words. It's like watching a soap opera with the TV muted. After all, the meaning will still be clear. Rambo confirmed this observation by conducting an experiment comparing the sentence comprehension of 8-year-old Kanzi and 2-year-old girl Ali. Testing lasted from May 1988 to February 1989. Out of 600 oral tasks and Kanzi did 80%, and Ali did 60%. For example, “put the plate in the microwave”, “take the bucket outside”, “pour lemonade into Coca-Cola”, “pick pine needles in a bag”, etc. So amazing language behavior monkeys poses an obvious, albeit controversial question: is the language of Washo, Kanzi and Koko close to the language of a two-year-old child, or is it a completely different “language”, only slightly similar to the human one?

It was very difficult to argue with the results of Savage-Rumbaugh's research. For those who value human exceptionalism, all that remains is to assert that, after all, the language that monkeys use is still very far from human. As in the joke: “A pig entered the circus arena and played a virtuoso piece on the violin. Everyone applauds enthusiastically, and only one spectator does not clap, looking indifferently at the stage. “Didn’t you like it?” - asks his neighbor. “No, not bad, but not Oistrakh.”

In the animal world: culture, education, emotions

"Animals are unconscious." This thesis is last hope to assert the exclusive position of man among other living beings, giving us the moral right to keep them in cages, use them for experiments and build factories for the production of “live meat”.

But back in the middle of the twentieth century, ethology appeared - the science of animal behavior. And the observations of ethologists allowed us to take a completely different look at the mental abilities of animals.

It turns out that apes (like elephants and dolphins) are self-aware, at least on a bodily level: they recognize themselves in the mirror. The range of emotions they display is very rich. For example, according to the observations of ethologist Penny Patterson, gorillas love and hate, cry and laugh, they are familiar with pride and shame, sympathy and jealousy... One of latest research, carried out by British biologists from the University of St. Andrews, even showed that dolphins have a semblance of permanent names for each other.

Many apes use tools, which until recently was considered the exclusive privilege of humans. “Since about half a century ago Jane van Lawick-Goo-doll first saw chimpanzees using a thin twig to fish out its inhabitants from a hole in a termite mound, zoologists have discovered in the behavioral repertoire of these monkeys about forty more methods of purposeful use of all kinds of objects,” - says Evgeny Panov from the Institute of Problems of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

This is no longer an instinct, but a cultural skill that is passed on from generation to generation. IN recent years More and more research is emerging cultural traditions among monkeys, and the word “culture” is used there without quotation marks.

However, as Evgeniy Panov argues, “the high level of development of the tool activity of great apes indicates their ability to rationally plan long sequences of actions. However, this does not lead to the emergence of a developing material culture.”

But maybe monkeys just don’t need it? Let us remember the aphorism of Douglas Adams: “Man has always believed that he is smarter than dolphins, because he has achieved a lot: he invented the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, while dolphins did nothing but have fun, tumbling in the water. Dolphins, for their part, have always believed that they are much smarter than people- precisely for this reason."

Yes, the brain of an ape weighs three times less than ours, but this does not make us an exception among other living creatures: dolphins, whales, and elephants have much larger brains than ours. The researchers came up with the idea of ​​comparing not brain volume, but the ratio of brain weight to body weight. But bad luck - laboratory mice were ahead of us in terms of this coefficient.

The Gardners then worked with three chimpanzees. Moye (her name means “one” in Swahili) is six years old, Tatu (“three”) is in her fourth year, Nne (“four”) is a male and is two and a half years old. Washoe was removed from the experiment shortly before this phase began. All chimpanzees were brought to the farm no later than the fourth day after birth. From the very beginning they lived according to a strict, scientifically based regime. Each animal has its own living space - a bedroom, a place to play, a bathroom and a dining room. Three staff members work with each pet and quickly teach the chimpanzee ASL in strictly planned sessions. The teachers are used to using it - one of the employees is deaf herself, the rest are children of deaf parents. In the presence of animals, all employees on the farm communicate only using ASL, so the chimpanzees never hear human speech.

The working day on the farm begins at seven in the morning, when the servants wake up the chimpanzees. The “sign of the day” is determined daily - new sign, which educators try to introduce into the everyday life of their pets when the situation is appropriate, creating as natural conditions as possible for replenishing their vocabulary. After the obligatory morning toilet, breakfast, including, among other things, a glass of warm milk. And while eating, chimpanzees learn to be independent: they must tie their own bib and eat without outside help. After eating, brush your teeth and brush your fur.

If it's not hot, chimpanzees wear clothes that they have to put on themselves. They make the beds and do the cleaning. As a rule, monkeys are able to wipe up spilled liquid, wash dishes, and perform other tasks. All this has a beneficial effect on language acquisition and allows you to avoid becoming spoiled.

Classes are held before and after lunch. Half an hour - training in the use of signs, and another half hour - viewing illustrated magazines and books. With so-called “pedagogical” games, they are encouraged to draw, select objects from a certain series, play with cubes, they are taught to thread a needle and even sew. It has been established that chimpanzees have enough attention for thirty minutes. And to avoid overexertion, they are sent to bed twice during the day. At about seven in the evening they bathe and frolic until bedtime in long, light clothes so that their fur dries well.

With this lifestyle, Moya acquired vocabulary, numbering 150 signs, and Tattoo - more than 60. Once a week, all the researchers get together to discuss the results of the work, including the evolution of the "chimpanzee to chimpanzee signs" program. In some weeks, up to 19 acts of communication between animals using ASL were recorded. Most of them boil down to signs like “come play” or “come tickle” (chimpanzees love to be tickled). It happened that Moya, willingly rolling Tattoo on herself, gave the signal “here”, pointing to her back, where Tattoo was supposed to climb. Moya signifies "baby" for Nne, coos at him, and lets him drink from her bottle, while Nne himself, for a reason known only to himself, calls Moya a cookie.

This generation of chimpanzees, as comparisons have shown, overtook Washoe in development, since their acquaintance with the ASL language began earlier and they were in a more favorable “stimulating” environment from the first days.

The conversational capabilities of great apes are being successfully studied in the United States and in four other experiments.

But an experiment conducted with chimpanzees at Columbia University in New York was recently interrupted. The reasons that prompted psychology professor Herb Terrace to capitulate caused serious controversy among his colleagues.

Four years ago, Terrace began an experiment in which chimpanzee Nima (his full name Nim Chimpsky - an allusion to the American linguist Nom Chomsky) was also taught ASL. Nim mastered sign language as diligently as the other “prodigies,” and even extended his hands to his teachers to show him new signs. He successfully passed the “baby” phase language development, inventing new signs, and learned... to deceive and scold. Despite all this, Terrace came to the conclusion that chimpanzees are incapable of constructing sentences correctly. In his experiments, Terrais paid attention not to how Nim's vocabulary was replenished, but to the grammar of his statements. Nim, making up a combination of two words, connected the words quite meaningfully. Some words, for example, “more,” were always in first place for him, others, for example, “me,” “me,” were in second. Nim saw that the phrases “give me” and “give me” are not constructed the same way. But, according to Terrace, he did not go further. This is where the differences in the use of conversational skills between young children and chimpanzees begin.

Firstly, if chimpanzees build combinations of three or more word-signs, then the third and subsequent elements only in rare cases contain additional information; they either repeat an already used gesture, or add a name to a personal pronoun - “play (with) me Nim( om)" Of the 21 four-member sentences that Nim formed, only one did not contain repetitions. In children's language, such repetitions, according to linguistics, are almost never observed.

The second difference is what linguists call the average length of an expression. As children get older, they use increasingly longer and more complex phrases. At two years old average length Their sentences are approximately the same as Nim's - 1.5 words (or characters), but over the next two years the length of Nim's phrases grew very slowly, while in children (both deaf and healthy) it increases sharply.

And Nim’s semantics was different from the children’s. He was unable to communicate between semantic meaning sign and the way it is used. The positional connection between, for example, something edible and the corresponding verb did not exist for Nim - he did not see any difference between “there is a nut” and “the nut is.” It follows, Terrace argues, that chimpanzees do not understand what they say.

Finally, Terrace held thorough analysis films that captured Nim's "conversations" with a person, and compared these results with a study of conversations between children and parents. Children early begin to understand that conversation is a kind of game in which the participants constantly change roles: first one will speak, then the other. The child rarely interrupts the interlocutor or speaks at the same time as him. In Nim's case, in about 50 percent of cases, statements were inserted into the interlocutor's speech.

There are three ways to maintain a conversation after your partner has finished speaking: you can repeat the other person’s phrase in full, you can partially reproduce what was said and add something of your own, and, finally, you can say something completely new. Children under two years of age repeat up to 20 percent of their parents’ statements. . On next year the percentage of repetitions drops to two percent. Nim, however, imitated 40 percent of his teachers' phrases throughout his third year. Children under two years of age complement what the interlocutor says in 20 percent of cases, and by the age of three they support half of the conversations in this way. Nim's additions did not exceed 10 percent

Between ape and man

One of the main problems is that we look everywhere for “similarities” to our mind and our language, unable to imagine anything else. "Talking" monkeys are completely different creatures from their natural relatives, the "stupid monkeys" as Washoe calls them. But they never become people, at least in the eyes of the people themselves.

Washoe was named after the area in Nevada where the Gardners lived. It subsequently turned out that in the language of the Indian tribe that originally lived in this area, “Washoe” means person. Washoe herself considered herself a human being. “She’s a person just like you and me,” says her teacher Penny Patterson about her Coco. In an experiment on dividing photographs into two categories - “people” and “animals” - Vicki, who knew only three words, confidently put her photo in the “people” group (like all the other “talking” monkeys with whom this experiment was carried out ). She also confidently and with visible disgust placed photos of her own “non-speaking” father in the “animals” group along with photographs of horses and elephants.

Apparently, linguists and biologists simply do not have a reasoned answer to this question. AND main reason the disagreement is that there are still no established definitions and concepts. What a child and a monkey perceive human language in different ways - that's for sure. But “talking” monkeys classify reality in a way similar to humans. They divide the phenomena of the surrounding reality into the same categories as people. For example, with the sign “baby” all trained monkeys designated children, puppies, and dolls. Washoe made the “dog” sign when she met dogs, when she heard dogs bark, and when she saw pictures of them—regardless of the breed. Children do the same thing. Koko the gorilla, seeing a ring on Penny’s finger, “said”: “finger necklace.” And the chimpanzee Washoe called the swan “water bird.” What is this if not the language of a child? He, too, when he sees a plane, says “butterfly.” Moreover, Koko’s gorilla fiance Michael, who learned sign language at a very late age, showed miracles of ingenuity! He appealed abstract concepts such as past, present and future.

He once talked about how when he was little and lived in the jungle, hunters killed his mother. Unlike people, “speaking” monkeys long ago solved the problem of “identifying” their language: in their opinion, it is definitely human. And since language is a unique sign of a person, it means that they themselves “became people.” This conclusion was confirmed more than once. Washoe, for example, without doubt, considered herself a member of the human race, and called other chimpanzees “black creatures.” Coco also considered herself a human. When asked to separate photos of animals from photos of people, she confidently placed her image with the images of people. But she placed a photograph of her hairy and naked father next to a pile of elephants, horses and dogs.

How should we relate to these creatures? In the glorious Soviet film “The Adventures of Electronics,” there was exactly the same problem: for adults, Elektronik is a talking robot, and he can and should be “turned on and off,” while children see clearly: this is a person, even more of a person than his twin Syroezhkin.

Today, animal rights supporters are viewed as sentimental nutcases. But perhaps tomorrow everything will change, because once upon a time slaves or representatives of other human races were not considered people.

Super-intelligent chimpanzees so far only exist in films, like the recent "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." In real life, monkeys are still just very smart animals. Just how smart are they?

The first evidence that chimpanzees have the rudiments of strong intelligence was obtained in the 60s of the last century in Gombe, Tanzania. Now famous anthropologist Jane Goodall conducted observations of a group of chimpanzees and witnessed their ability to use improvised tools when obtaining food (chimpanzees made sticks for catching termites). Until this point, making tools was considered the privilege of only Homo sapiens.

In the photo Francine "Penny" Patterson(left) asks the gorilla using sign language Coco Isn't she hungry? The photograph is dated May 21, 1976. Coco tells her with gestures that she is hungry.

Gorilla Koko was born in 1971 and today she is the most sociable of primates. Her sign vocabulary consists of more than a thousand characters and she can understand about two thousand words of spoken English. At the same time, she can start a conversation with a person herself, since she is interested in communicating with people.
Her IQ level fluctuates between 75 and 95 points, while among people 100 points is already considered normal for full development.

The next photo shows a researcher Sue Savage-Rumbout(Sue Savage-Rumbaugh) hugs a chimpanzee named Kanzi at the Language Research Center in Atlanta. Kanzi just passed one of the language texts.

Kanzi was born in 1980 and is now the most famous "talking" monkey in the world. He was the first chimpanzee to learn sign language as he grew older, as small children typically do. Greatapetrust.org also reports that he was the first chimpanzee to construct new phrases and sentences that required specific responses. Moreover, Kenzi has established himself as a master at stone processing and creating tools from stones for work.

The next photo shows an orangutan Azi points with a finger at the symbol representing an apple after being shown a piece of an apple. Photo taken in 1996 at the Brain Institute in Washington.

The new photo shows an adult female gorilla in national park Congo uses a stick in his hands to measure the depth level. The moment was captured by researchers in 2005.

In total, in 2007, a group of chimpanzees were recorded making sticks and spears for hunting mammals 22 times. The latter was also a kind of discovery. Many people previously believed that chimpanzees did not eat meat. They hunted, in particular, smaller species of primates.

One memory test used two young chimpanzees against two humans. The monkeys prevailed, which casts doubt on the assurances of many scientists that humans are superior to monkeys in all cognitive parameters.

Wildlife Conservation Society's Breuer notes that apes are better at navigating memory tests than humans, solving them much faster and in a completely different way.

Monkeys and other animals are known to use their spatial memory to find fruit in tropical rainforests. However, it was unclear to scientists how they generally search for fruits. Ethologists conducted observations of chimpanzees ( National Park Tay, Ivory Coast, West Africa), exploring what strategies primates use to find fruit. At the same time, they discovered that animals have knowledge of botany, which they successfully use in search of food.

As researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Karline Janmaat and Christophe Boesch, write in the journal Animal Cognition, “chimpanzees know that certain types of trees bear fruit at the same time and use these botanical information in their daily search for food. If the fruits of a certain tree are ripe, they check other trees especially carefully to see if there are already ripe fruits there."

During their observations, scientists who studied the behavior of chimpanzees followed the animals in their habitats and noticed how the chimpanzees fixed their eyes on the treetops. For their analysis, they only used recordings in which chimpanzees were looking for food in trees where there was no fruit at all - acting "incorrectly", so to speak. Thus, primatologists were able to exclude from these “errors” that the sight and smell of the fruits caused the trees to be checked.

Chimpanzees examine fruits in the treetops Photo: Ammie Kalan

Instead they found interesting features chimpanzee behavior: they monitor these trees, expecting to find a ripe harvest there in the near future. After the monkeys ate the first ripened fruits, they realized that the likelihood of finding food increased significantly. "Chimpanzees didn't just have a preference for a particular type of fruit they ate in the past," says Carlin Janmaat, "instead, we can predict which trees the animals will inspect based on botanical characteristics (certain types of trees bear fruit at the same time)."

The researchers conclude: highly intelligent chimpanzees know that certain types fruit trees ripen at the same time, and apply this knowledge in their daily search for food, taking into account two factors:

1. botanical knowledge based on successful fruit searches;
2. ability to classify fruits.

"Our results show the variety of strategies our closest relatives, chimpanzees, use when searching for food. They also shed light on evolutionary origin human abilities for classification and abstract thinking,” says Christoph Bosch, head of the department of primatology (Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology).

The honor of “first contact”—a conversation between representatives of different species—goes to the chimpanzee Washoe and her caregivers, husband and wife Allen and Beatrice Gardner. By that time, it was already known that animals are capable of thinking: they can solve problems “in their minds,” that is, not only by trial and error, but also by inventing new behavior options.

This was proven by the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, who conducted his famous studies of chimpanzee intelligence at the beginning of the twentieth century. In one of his experiments, a monkey, after a number of unsuccessful attempts to knock down a high-hanging banana with a stick or to get it by climbing on a box, sat down, “thought,” and then got up, put the boxes one on top of the other, climbed on them with a stick and knocked down the target.

These experiments inspired scientists to make their first attempts to “humanize” monkeys. In the 1930s, the psychologist couple Kellogg adopted a baby chimpanzee named Gua, who grew up with their one-year-old son Donald. Parents tried not to make differences between “children” and communicate with them equally.

True, they failed to achieve much success in raising Gua, but Donald began to become an ape: the development of his speech slowed down, but he learned to perfectly imitate Gua’s cries and habits and even began to gnaw bark from trees after him. The frightened parents had to stop the experiment, Gua was sent to the zoo. Another pair of psychologists, the Hayes couple, who raised the chimpanzee Vicky, with great difficulty, managed to teach her to pronounce a few words: “mom”, “dad”, “cup”.

Only in 1966, ethologists Allen and Beatrice Gardner, watching films about Vicki, noticed that she wanted and could communicate using signs: for example, she really loved to ride in a car and, in order to communicate her desire to people, she came up with the idea of ​​​​bringing them images cars that I tore out of magazines. What made her unable to speak was not a lack of intelligence, but the structure of her larynx. And then the Gardners came up with the idea of ​​teaching chimpanzees sign language, which is used by the deaf and dumb.

Thus began the Washoe Project.

Washoe and her family

The future first lady of the chimpanzee world was a 10-month-old baby caught in Africa: she was originally supposed to be used in space research - apparently, she was simply born for fame.

The Gardners raised Washoe as their own child. She not only remembered the gestures with which her adoptive parents addressed her, but also asked questions, commented on her own actions and the actions of her teachers, and spoke to them herself.

Her first “word” was the sign “more!”: tickle more, hug, treat, or introduce new words. During the first year of living with the Gardners, Washoe mastered 30 signs-words of Amslen - the American language of the deaf and dumb, and in the first three years - 130 signs. Acquiring language in the same sequence as the child, she learned to combine signs into simple sentences. For example, Washoe pesters one of the researchers to give her the cigarette that he was smoking: the signs “give me smoke”, “smoke Washoe”, “quickly give me smoke” follow. Finally the researcher said, “Ask nicely,” to which Washoe responded, “Please give me that hot smoke.” However, they never gave her a cigarette.

Chimpanzees also easily acquired such seemingly purely human skills as joking, deceiving, and even swearing. She called one of the servants, who did not let her drink for a long time, “dirty Jack.” But swearing is not at all such a primitive thing, since it speaks of Washoe’s ability to use words in a figurative sense, to generalize their meanings. It is on this ability to generalize with the help of words that human intelligence is built.

It turned out that Washoe builds generalizations no worse than small children who are beginning to master a language do. For example, one of the first signs she learned was “open!” - she first used it when she wanted the door of a room to be opened for her, then she began to use it to open all doors, then for boxes, containers, bottles, and finally even to open the water tap.

The monkey correctly used personal pronouns, ideas about the past and future (in the future she was mainly interested in holidays, such as Christmas, which she loved very much), word order in sentences (for example, she perfectly understood the difference between “You tickle me” and “I tickle you”) "). Sometimes Washoe tried to “speak” not only to people, but also to other creatures. One day, when a dog was chasing the car in which she was traveling, barking, Washoe, who was deathly afraid of dogs, instead of hiding as usual, leaned out of the window and began to desperately gesticulate: “Dog, go away!”

Meanwhile, several other newly born chimpanzees were brought to the Gardner laboratory. They learned quickly and soon began communicating with each other in sign language. And when Washoe’s baby was born, he began to learn gestures, no longer watching people, but other monkeys. At the same time, researchers have more than once noticed how Washoe “puts his hand on him” - corrects the gesture-symbol.

In April 1967, Washoe used word compounds for the first time. She asked “give me something sweet” and “go open it.” At this time, the chimpanzee was at the age when human children first begin to use two-word combinations. Comparison of the abilities of humans and monkeys was the next direction of research. But this aspect also brought some trouble for the Gardners. The fact is that at first some of the scientists did not recognize Washoe’s ability to speak. Roger Brown, a Harvard University professor known for his research on early childhood language development, believed that Washoe did not always strictly adhere to the correct word order and, therefore, did not understand the connections between different categories of words that give a certain meaning to a sentence. Jacob Bronowski and linguist Ursula Bellugi published a scathing article arguing that Washoe could not speak because she never asked questions or used negative sentences. Finally, linguist Nom Chomsky categorically stated that the chimpanzee brain is not designed for an animal to speak.

Research, meanwhile, produced more and more new results, which the Gardners analyzed and carefully compared with existing data on speech development in children. And critics were soon forced to withdraw some of their objections

Roger Brown recognized that word order does not matter. In some languages, such as Finnish, it is not as important as in English. The placement of words in a sentence does not play a big role in ASL either. And children themselves often violate the order of words, but... they understand each other perfectly.

The Gardners concluded that children and monkeys are very similar when it comes to answering questions, constructing binary sentences, using nouns, verbs and adjectives, and word order in sentences. Unfamiliar with grammatical rules, children, like chimpanzees, tend to replace entire sentences with one or two words.

The test showed that Washoe freely asks questions and uses negative sentences. The monkey is able to use the signs “no,” “I can’t,” and “that’s enough.” Washoe eagerly leafed through illustrated magazines, asking people, “What is this?” Chomsky’s statements about the limited capabilities of the chimpanzee brain simply cannot be verified: there are still no methods that would allow us to clarify this issue. Only recently, the American scientist Norman Geschwind began experiments to determine whether there is an area in the chimpanzee brain similar to the one that regulates speech activity in humans.

When the Gardners finished their work with Washoe in 1970, she was in danger of going to one of the biomedical centers “for experiments” and, if not dying, then at least spending the rest of her days in a small solitary cell. She, and then other chimpanzees who were trained in the laboratory, were saved by the Gardners’ assistant Roger Fouts, who created the “Monkey Farm”, where the “Washoe family” now lives - a colony of “talking” monkeys.

Gorilla Professor

The results of research on the “Washoe family” seemed completely incredible, but in the 70s, several groups of independent researchers working with different species of great apes confirmed and supplemented these data. Perhaps the most capable of all 25 “talking” monkeys was the gorilla Koko, who lives near San Francisco. Coco is a real professor: she uses, according to various estimates, from 500 to a thousand Amslen characters, is able to understand about 2000 more signs and words of the English language, and, when solving tests, shows an IQ that corresponds to the norm for an adult American.

However, like other “talking” monkeys, the main development of its speech and intelligence occurred in the first years of life (as a rule, talented monkeys reach the level of a two-year-old child in speech development, and in some respects, a three-year-old child). Growing up, they remain in many ways like children, react childishly to life situations and prefer games to all other ways of spending time. Coco still plays with dolls and toy animals and talks to them, although she gets embarrassed when someone catches her doing this.

For example, Coco acts out an imaginary situation between two toy gorillas. Having placed the toys in front of him, the monkey gestures: “bad, bad” towards the pink gorilla, and then “kiss!” towards the blue one. And when her gorilla partner Michael tore the leg off her rag doll, Coco burst out with the most terrible curse ever heard from a monkey: “You dirty bad toilet!”

Coco loves cats very much (she had her own cat, which recently died), and loves to draw. Koko's drawings can be viewed on her website http://www.koko.org/index.php, where you can also find out the latest news from the life of a gorilla, who is already approaching forty (chimpanzees and gorillas can live up to 45-50 years).

Now scientists want to take Coco’s “humanization” to a new level - they are going to teach her to read.

Trained animals or brothers in mind?

However, the conclusions from these studies turned out to be too scandalous and completely unacceptable for most of the scientific community. On the one hand, “talking” monkeys turned out to be the fly in the ointment of the reasoning of philosophers and psychologists about the gap between a person with consciousness and animals, like automata, controlled by reflexes and instincts.

On the other hand, linguists attacked: according to the dominant concept in American linguistic knowledge, Noam Chomsky, language is a manifestation of a genetic ability peculiar only to humans (by the way, in mockery one of the “talking” monkeys was called Nim Chimsky).

According to critics, the monkeys' gestures are not meaningful signs, but simple imitation of researchers, at best "conditioned reflexes" acquired as a result of training. Experimenters, when talking to monkeys, allegedly give them hints all the time, without realizing it themselves - with facial expressions, gaze, intonation, and the monkeys are guided not by their words, but by non-verbal information.

The “talking” monkeys were compared to Clever Hans, the Oryol trotter, whose owner “taught” the horse to count and answer questions. Then it turned out that Hans was simply reacting to the subtle movements of his trainer.

Among the skeptics was researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. She decided to refute the idea of ​​“talking” monkeys. A series of studies began in which dwarf shim-pan-ze-bonobos communicated with scientists via a computer in a specially developed artificial language - Yerkish. Instead of gestures, he was taught to use a special computer keyboard with conventional keys-icons, which represented words. When you pressed a key, the word was displayed on the monitor as a picture. Thus, it is convenient to conduct a dialogue, correct or supplement remarks. But Kanzi also recognized about 150 words without special training. His guardian, Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, just talked to him like that.

One of Rambeau's goals was to reward the monkeys as little as possible for correct answers. The adult monkeys Savage-Rumbaugh worked with showed little talent and only deepened her skepticism. But at one fine moment, baby Kanzi - the son of one of these monkeys, who was always hovering around his mother - suddenly began, on his own initiative, to be responsible for her. Until that moment, no one had taught him anything, researchers did not pay much attention to him at all, but he answered brilliantly.

It soon became clear that he had just as spontaneously learned to understand English, and in addition showed considerable talent for computer games. Gradually, thanks to the successes of Kanzi and his sister Bonbonisha, Savage-Rumbaugh’s skepticism disappeared, and she began to present evidence to the scientific world that her “talking” chimpanzees knew three languages ​​(Yerkish, Amslen and about 2000 English words) and understood the meanings of words and sentence syntax, are capable of generalization and metaphor, talk to each other and learn from each other.

According to the scientist, monkeys often guess the intentions of the speaker, even without understanding the meaning of the words. It's like watching a soap opera with the TV muted. After all, the meaning will still be clear. Rambo confirmed this observation by conducting an experiment comparing the sentence comprehension of 8-year-old Kanzi and 2-year-old girl Ali. Testing lasted from May 1988 to February 1989. Out of 600 oral tasks, Kanzi completed 80%, and Ali completed 60%. For example, “put the plate in the microwave”, “take the bucket outside”, “pour lemonade into Coca-Cola”, “put pine needles in a bag”, etc. This amazing linguistic behavior of monkeys raises an obvious, albeit ambiguous question: Can we consider that the language of Washoe, Kanzi and Koko is close to the language of a two-year-old child, or is it a completely different “language”, only slightly similar to human?

It was very difficult to argue with the results of Savage-Rumbaugh's research. For those who value human exceptionalism, all that remains is to assert that, after all, the language that monkeys use is still very far from human. As in the joke: “A pig entered the circus arena and played a virtuoso piece on the violin. Everyone applauds enthusiastically, and only one spectator does not clap, looking indifferently at the stage. “Didn’t you like it?” - asks his neighbor. “No, not bad, but not Oistrakh.”

In the animal world: culture, education, emotions

"Animals are unconscious." This thesis is the last hope to establish the exclusive position of man among other living beings, giving us the moral right to keep them in cages, use them for experiments and build factories for the production of “living meat.”

But back in the middle of the twentieth century, ethology appeared - the science of animal behavior. And the observations of ethologists allowed us to take a completely different look at the mental abilities of animals.

It turns out that apes (like elephants and dolphins) are self-aware, at least on a bodily level: they recognize themselves in the mirror. The range of emotions they display is very rich. For example, according to the observations of ethologist Penny Patterson, gorillas love and hate, cry and laugh, they are familiar with pride and shame, sympathy and jealousy... One of the latest studies carried out by British biologists from the University of St. Andrews even showed that dolphins have a semblance of constant names for each other.

Many apes use tools, which until recently was considered the exclusive privilege of humans. “Since about half a century ago Jane van Lawick-Goo-doll first saw chimpanzees using a thin twig to fish out its inhabitants from a hole in a termite mound, zoologists have discovered in the behavioral repertoire of these monkeys about forty more methods of purposeful use of all kinds of objects,” - says Evgeny Panov from the Institute of Problems of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

This is no longer an instinct, but a cultural skill that is passed on from generation to generation. In recent years, more and more studies of cultural traditions in monkeys have appeared, and the word “culture” is used there without quotation marks.

However, as Evgeniy Panov argues, “the high level of development of the tool activity of great apes indicates their ability to rationally plan long sequences of actions. However, this does not lead to the emergence of a developing material culture.”

But maybe monkeys just don’t need it? Let us remember the aphorism of Douglas Adams: “Man has always believed that he is smarter than dolphins, because he has achieved a lot: he invented the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, while dolphins did nothing but have fun, tumbling in the water. Dolphins, for their part, have always believed that they are much more intelligent than people - precisely for this reason.”

Yes, the brain of an ape weighs three times less than ours, but this does not make us an exception among other living creatures: dolphins, whales, and elephants have much larger brains than ours. The researchers came up with the idea of ​​comparing not brain volume, but the ratio of brain weight to body weight. But bad luck - laboratory mice were ahead of us in terms of this coefficient.

The Gardners then worked with three chimpanzees. Moye (her name means “one” in Swahili) is six years old, Tatu (“three”) is in her fourth year, Nne (“four”) is a male and is two and a half years old. Washoe was removed from the experiment shortly before this phase began. All chimpanzees were brought to the farm no later than the fourth day after birth. From the very beginning they lived according to a strict, scientifically based regime. Each animal has its own living space - a bedroom, a place to play, a bathroom and a dining room. Three staff members work with each pet and quickly teach the chimpanzee ASL in strictly planned sessions. The teachers are used to using it - one of the employees is deaf herself, the rest are children of deaf parents. In the presence of animals, all employees on the farm communicate only using ASL, so the chimpanzees never hear human speech.

The working day on the farm begins at seven in the morning, when the servants wake up the chimpanzees. Every day, the “sign of the day” is determined - a new sign that educators try to introduce, when the situation is appropriate, into the everyday life of their pets, creating the most natural conditions possible for replenishing their vocabulary. After the obligatory morning toilet, breakfast, including, among other things, a glass of warm milk. And while eating, chimpanzees learn to be independent: they must tie their own bib and eat without outside help. After eating, brush your teeth and brush your fur.

If it's not hot, chimpanzees wear clothes that they have to put on themselves. They make the beds and do the cleaning. As a rule, monkeys are able to wipe up spilled liquid, wash dishes, and perform other tasks. All this has a beneficial effect on language acquisition and allows you to avoid becoming spoiled.

Classes are held before and after lunch. Half an hour - training in the use of signs, and another half hour - viewing illustrated magazines and books. With so-called “pedagogical” games, they are encouraged to draw, select objects from a certain series, play with cubes, they are taught to thread a needle and even sew. It has been established that chimpanzees have enough attention for thirty minutes. And to avoid overexertion, they are sent to bed twice during the day. At about seven in the evening they bathe and frolic until bedtime in long, light clothes so that their fur dries well.

With this lifestyle, Moya has acquired a vocabulary of 150 signs, and Tatu has acquired more than 60. Once a week, all the researchers meet together to discuss the results of the work, including the evolution of the chimpanzee-to-chimpanzee signs program. In some weeks, up to 19 acts of communication between animals using ASL were recorded. Most of them boil down to signs like “come play” or “come tickle” (chimpanzees love to be tickled). It happened that Moya, willingly rolling Tattoo on herself, gave the signal “here”, pointing to her back, where Tattoo was supposed to climb. Moya signifies "baby" for Nne, coos at him, and lets him drink from her bottle, while Nne himself, for a reason known only to himself, calls Moya a cookie.

This generation of chimpanzees, as comparisons have shown, overtook Washoe in development, since their acquaintance with the ASL language began earlier and they were in a more favorable “stimulating” environment from the first days.

The conversational capabilities of great apes are being successfully studied in the United States and in four other experiments.

But an experiment conducted with chimpanzees at Columbia University in New York was recently interrupted. The reasons that prompted psychology professor Herb Terrace to capitulate caused serious controversy among his colleagues.

Four years ago, Terrace began an experiment in which the chimpanzee Nim (whose full name is Nim Chimpsky, a reference to the American linguist Nom Chomsky) was also taught ASL. Nim mastered sign language as diligently as the other “prodigies,” and even extended his hands to his teachers to show him new signs. He successfully passed the “childhood” phase of language development, inventing new signs, and learned... to deceive and swear. Despite all this, Terrace came to the conclusion that chimpanzees are incapable of constructing sentences correctly. In his experiments, Terrais paid attention not to how Nim's vocabulary was replenished, but to the grammar of his statements. Nim, making up a combination of two words, connected the words quite meaningfully. Some words, for example, “more,” were always in first place for him, others, for example, “me,” “me,” were in second. Nim saw that the phrases “give me” and “give me” are not constructed the same way. But, according to Terrace, he did not go further. This is where the differences in the use of conversational skills between young children and chimpanzees begin.

Firstly, if chimpanzees build combinations of three or more word-signs, then the third and subsequent elements only in rare cases contain additional information; they either repeat an already used gesture, or add a name to a personal pronoun - “play (with) me Nim( om)" Of the 21 four-member sentences that Nim formed, only one did not contain repetitions. In children's language, such repetitions, according to linguistics, are almost never observed.

The second difference is what linguists call the average length of an expression. As children get older, they use increasingly longer and more complex phrases. At two years old, the average length of their sentences was approximately the same as Nim's - 1.5 words (or characters), but in the next two years, the length of Nim's sentences grew very slowly, while children (both deaf and healthy) ) it increases sharply.

And Nim’s semantics was different from the children’s. The connection between the semantic meaning of a sign and the way it is used was inaccessible to him. The positional connection between, for example, something edible and the corresponding verb did not exist for Nim - he did not see any difference between “there is a nut” and “the nut is.” It follows, Terrace argues, that chimpanzees do not understand what they say.

Finally, Terrace conducted a thorough analysis of films that captured Nim's "conversations" with a person, and compared these results with studies of conversations between children and parents. Children early begin to understand that conversation is a kind of game in which the participants constantly change roles: first one will speak, then the other. The child rarely interrupts the interlocutor or speaks at the same time as him. In Nim's case, in about 50 percent of cases, statements were inserted into the interlocutor's speech.

There are three ways to maintain a conversation after your partner has finished speaking: you can repeat the other person’s phrase in full, you can partially reproduce what was said and add something of your own, and, finally, you can say something completely new. Children under two years of age repeat up to 20 percent of their parents’ statements. . The following year, the percentage of repetitions drops to two percent. Nim, however, imitated 40 percent of his teachers' phrases throughout his third year. Children under two years of age complement what the interlocutor says in 20 percent of cases, and by the age of three they support half of the conversations in this way. Nim's additions did not exceed 10 percent

Between ape and man

One of the main problems is that we look everywhere for “similarities” to our mind and our language, unable to imagine anything else. "Talking" monkeys are completely different creatures from their natural relatives, the "stupid monkeys" as Washoe calls them. But they never become people, at least in the eyes of the people themselves.

Washoe was named after the area in Nevada where the Gardners lived. It subsequently turned out that in the language of the Indian tribe that originally lived in this area, “Washoe” means person. Washoe herself considered herself a human being. “She’s a person just like you and me,” says her teacher Penny Patterson about her Coco. In an experiment on dividing photographs into two categories - “people” and “animals” - Vicki, who knew only three words, confidently put her photo in the “people” group (like all the other “talking” monkeys with whom this experiment was carried out ). She also confidently and with visible disgust placed photos of her own “non-speaking” father in the “animals” group along with photographs of horses and elephants.

Apparently, linguists and biologists simply do not have a reasoned answer to this question. And the main reason for the disagreement is that there are still no established definitions and concepts. The fact that a child and a monkey perceive human language differently is undeniable. But “talking” monkeys classify reality in a way similar to humans. They divide the phenomena of the surrounding reality into the same categories as people. For example, with the sign “baby” all trained monkeys designated children, puppies, and dolls. Washoe made the “dog” sign when she met dogs, when she heard dogs bark, and when she saw pictures of them—regardless of the breed. Children do the same thing. Koko the gorilla, seeing a ring on Penny’s finger, “said”: “finger necklace.” And the chimpanzee Washoe called the swan “water bird.” What is this if not the language of a child? He, too, when he sees a plane, says “butterfly.” Moreover, Koko’s gorilla fiance Michael, who learned sign language at a very late age, showed miracles of ingenuity! He appealed to abstract concepts such as past, present and future.

He once talked about how when he was little and lived in the jungle, hunters killed his mother. Unlike people, “speaking” monkeys long ago solved the problem of “identifying” their language: in their opinion, it is definitely human. And since language is a unique sign of a person, it means that they themselves “became people.” This conclusion was confirmed more than once. Washoe, for example, without doubt, considered herself a member of the human race, and called other chimpanzees “black creatures.” Coco also considered herself a human. When asked to separate photos of animals from photos of people, she confidently placed her image with the images of people. But she placed a photograph of her hairy and naked father next to a pile of elephants, horses and dogs.

How should we relate to these creatures? In the glorious Soviet film “The Adventures of Electronics,” there was exactly the same problem: for adults, Elektronik is a talking robot, and he can and should be “turned on and off,” while children see clearly: this is a person, even more of a person than his twin Syroezhkin.

Today, animal rights supporters are viewed as sentimental nutcases. But perhaps tomorrow everything will change, because once upon a time slaves or representatives of other human races were not considered people.