We can see how such inventions made in different, nearly isolated, groups can lead to cultural differentiation even in monkeys. A much more innovative species of primate, in which various groups are in occasional contact, conflict, or competition, might, we would guess, devise spectacular new forms of culture and technology.
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An early Algerian myth held that long ago apes could talk, but were rendered mute for their transgressions by the gods. There are many similar stories in Africa and elsewhere.17 In another widespread African story, apes can talk, but prudently refuse to do so—because talking apes, their intelligence in this way made manifest, will be put to work by humans. Their silence is proof of their intelligence. Occasionally the indigenous people would introduce a visiting explorer to a chimp with many remarkable skills and tell him that it could also speak. But, at least while the explorer was there, none ever did.
Lucy was a chimpanzee celebrity. She was one of the first of the apes to learn to use a human language. The mouth and throat of the chimp are not configured for speech as ours are. In the 1960s, the psychologists Beatrice and Robert Gardner wondered whether chimps might be intellectually capable of language but prevented from speaking by the limitations of their anatomy. Chimps have phenomenal dexterity. So the Gardners decided to teach a chimp named Washoe a gestural language, Ameslan, the American sign language used by hearing-impaired humans. Here each gesture can represent a word, rather than a syllable or a sound, and in this respect Ameslan is more like Chinese ideograms than the Greek, Latin, Arabic, or Hebrew alphabets.
Young female chimps proved to be adept pupils. Some of them eventually acquired vocabularies of hundreds of words. Julian Huxley—T. H. Huxley’s grandson, and a leading evolutionary biologist—had argued that “plenty of animals can express the fact that they are hungry, but none except man can ask for an egg or a banana.”18 Now there were chimps eagerly requesting bananas, oranges, chocolate candies, and much else, each represented by a different sign or symbol. Their communications were often clear, unambiguous, and apparently in context, as has been attested to by delighted audiences of hearing-impaired people watching films of signing chimps. They were able, it is said, to use their signs in a fairly consistent elementary grammar, and to invent from the words they knew phrases that they had never before encountered. Chimps were found to generalize a word such as “more” into new contexts—such as “more go” and “more fruit.”19 A swan evoked the spontaneous neologism, in independent and widespread use among humans, “water bird.”
Lucy was one of the first. It was she who signed “candy drink” after first tasting a watermelon, and “cry hurt food” after her first experience with a radish. She became, it is said, able to distinguish the meaning of “Lucy tickle Roger” from “Roger tickle Lucy.” Tickling is close to grooming. When idly turning the pages of a magazine, Lucy made the sign for “cat” when she turned to a picture of a tiger, and “drink” when she came upon a wine advertisement. Lucy had a human foster mother; she was, after all, only a few years old during the whole of her laboratory experience with language, and young chimps especially crave emotional support. One day, when her foster mother, Jane Temerlin, left the laboratory, Lucy gazed after her and signed, “Cry me. Me cry.”
Ameslan-literate apes have often been spied signing to themselves when they thought no one else was present. Perhaps this was just wordplay, trying to get the new skill down pat. Or perhaps it was an experiment to see if they could conjure “fruit,” say, out of the air with no humans present, just by producing the right words. It had worked well enough when humans were around.
To what extent Lucy and her fellows understood the gestural language they were using, and to what extent they were merely memorizing sequences of signs whose true meaning they failed to grasp, is a subject of scientific debate. To what extent young humans learning their first language do the one or the other is also subject to debate.
Perhaps only the hits were recorded and not the misses; that is, maybe Lucy and other chimps judged Ameslan-literate generated a wide range of signs more or less at random which, when they made contextual sense, were written up by the human observers and discussed at scientific meetings, but which, when irrelevant or unintelligible, were ignored. This is the anecdotal fallacy* that haunts this branch of science. But the anecdotes are plentiful and striking.
One of the most thoroughgoing examinations of the linguistic and grammatical abilities of apes was done by the psychologist Herbert Terrace and his colleagues, who recorded on videotape nearly twenty thousand signing attempts generated by a male chimp named Nim.20 He mastered over one hundred different gestural signs. Nim would regularly sign “Play me” or “Nim eat” in context and with apparent understanding. But there was no evidence, Terrace concluded, that Nim put more than two signs together in any consistent manner appropriate to the context. The average length of his sentences was less than two words long. His longest recorded sentence was “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” It does seem a little frantic, but oranges are tasty, chimps are not known for their patience, and anyone who has spent time with a small excited child will recognize the syntax. Note that four of the words are non-redundant (“give me orange you”), and that no words irrelevant to this urgent request are included among the sixteen. Emphasis through repetition is common in human languages. But the simplicity of chimp sentences has rendered their use of language unimpressive in the minds of many psychologists and linguists. Nim was also belittled for interrupting his trainers’ signing with his own, for being too imitative (repeating remarks of his trainer), and for not inventing grammatical rules such as the subject-predicate sequence.
This work has in turn been criticized. Chimps require close emotional ties for social tasks and, one would think, especially for something as difficult as language; instead, Nim had sixty different trainers over a four-year period. There is a tension between a loving, one-on-one environment that might be needed to teach language skills and the emotionally sterile protocols needed so that scientific results are, with high reliability, uncontaminated by the enthusiasm of the experimenters. It has frequently been found that apes sign most creatively in spontaneous circumstances in their everyday life, and not in experimental sessions. Too, there was great emphasis on drill in the Nim experiments, the very opposite of spontaneity. The complaint about Nim interrupting the signing of his trainer has itself been belittled, because Ameslan speakers may sign simultaneously without stepping on each other’s lines, an advantage of signing over speech. Delayed imitation is just what human children do when they first learn language. For all these reasons, just how much grammatical dexterity apes have is still an open question.21
But clearly chimps can use something like the rudiments of language with much greater facility than had been thought possible before the experiments of the Gardners. They can unambiguously associate certain signs with certain people, animals, or objects—unsurprising when there are monkeys with different alarm cries and evasion strategies for different species of predators. Chimps have mastered an elementary vocabulary of a few hundred words, comparable to what a normal human two-year-old can do. Chimps who have some knowledge of these signs and who are raised together have been known spontaneously to sign to one another. There is at least one case in which a young chimp, uninstructed by any human, is said to have learned dozens of signs from another chimp knowledgeable in Ameslan.22