English 101 for bonobos

Their character and curiosity is definitely coming out. Kanzi, for instance, shows a particular liking for the Victoria's Secret catalogue. "Good Night, Gorilla" seems to be a favorite book of the whole clan. Panbanisha may be the next Julia Child: She recently watched a tape of herself making eggs and noodles in the kitchen, and, as Fields looked on, she pointed to various lexigrams to narrate what would happen next.

Kanzi loves to play with his ball and the other toys, which he lugs around in his backpack. He knows how to build a fire and works with primitive tools: He'll flake and sharpen stones and then use them to cut rope.

On this day, Panbanisha dutifully – and rapidly – points to the lexigrams that a researcher requests. But she devotes most of her attention to trying to get a screw out of the battery compartment of a talking toy dog with a pair of scissors. Nearby, Kanzi is busy threading beads on a string – not an easy task with his large fingers. But he's persistent and surprisingly adept.

"I went into this as a true skeptic," says Duane Rumbaugh, who's been researching apes and language for several decades. "I anticipated failure with apes." Instead, Dr. Rumbaugh has become a true believer that apes are capable of understanding language, not just responding to visual cues.

Researchers are able to capture all the bonobos' actions because of a phalanx of cameras at the center, one of its most important features. The research team – which includes Fields, Rumbaugh, and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (lead scientist) – is doing more than just exploring the limits of ape communication and intelligence. It's trying to understand the role culture plays in their learning. "You can't have language without culture, or without choice and agency," Fields says.

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Watching Panbanisha put on a halloween mask to scare visitors, or seeing Kanzi goad visitors into chasing each other, it's hard not to see them as part human. And the researchers clearly feel a bond that goes far beyond scientist and subject. "It's like your own child," says Fields, as he talks about the week when Nyota, one of the youngest bonobos, nearly died. Fields didn't sleep for seven days. "Nyota loves Spiderman and Harry Potter, he didn't like Catwoman – he's really just a normal little boy."

Kanzi may be the media superstar of the group, famous from articles and photos, but Fields and Dr. Rumbaugh say Panbanisha is the analytical genius: She may understand as many as 6,000 spoken words. "Unlike Kanzi, she doesn't care about showing off what she knows," Fields says.

She's also empathetic. Fields remembers the day in Georgia when an armless orangutan whom Panbanisha felt protective of hadn't come inside, and Panbanisha got Fields's attention and reminded him to take milk to the primate – now. Another time, when Fields locked himself in a room, he sent her to tell Savage-Rumbaugh to bring a key. "These are anecdotes," says Fields. "But with cameras running all the time, you can start to get the data."

In the end, he and the other researchers will shed light not just on apes as our closest living relative, but on humans, too. "I think we can define culture in the kind of way anthropologists have been trying to do for a long time," says Fields.

And they hope that the discoveries about just how intelligent – and human – the bonobos and other apes are may help spur more efforts to save the threatened species in the wild, and offer insights into how best to do it.

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