Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: The Gentle Genius Of Bonobos

To begin, "The Gentle Genius of Bonobos" is a lecture given by Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, which describes the human-like behavior Bonobos seem to exhibit. Bonobos live around the Congo in Africa, and unfortunately do not appear much in zoos due to their intense human-like sexual behavior. This behavior however is a profound one in the ape culture, because Bonobos use it in multiple areas in their lives, such as communication and conflict resolution. Another similarity between humans and Bonobos is their body structure. Both species seem to stand "upright," which allows for better movement, such as walking bipedal. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh introduces Kanzi, a Bonobo whom she studied and interacted with. The video within this lecture illustrates Kanzi

performing human-like behaviors, such as preparing and maintaining a fire and creating tools. The video suggests that the ability to raise Bonobos in a diverse culture with both humans and Bonobos, a "panhomoculture," scientists have been able to see how cultural forces could have affected human evolution.
This lecture questions how much of a specie's behavior is determined by cultural influences and/or biological factors.

Unlike the majority of scientist studying evolution and behaviors, Savage-Rumbaugh believes that behavior is developed through social interaction or cultural influences rather than biological factors. In order to test and validate her hypothesis, she based her experiment on Bonobos, because they are the most biologically similar specie to humans. Over the course of a couple decades, Savage-Rumbaugh studies the Bonobos' abilities to learn behaviors by just observing rather than training. After studying the results of solely social interaction, Savage-Rumbaugh discovered that Bonobos have the basic neural functions, which allow them to create a form of communication that resembles our communication in a symbolic form. From that, Susan discovered her findings did support her hypothesis, regardless of its popularity. Even though she provided evidence that illustrated how cultural influences does contribute to how Bonobos learn, I believe more research needs to be conducted in order to fully state that there is a direct correlation between the ability to learn and/or behave and cultural influences rather than biological

ones.
In the Campbell Essential Biology book, chapter 17 discusses how biologists categorize animals by their body structure. They created phylogenetic trees that illustrate evolutionary relations between animal groups. Among this tree are nine phyla that categorize all animals. Both humans and Bonobos (Chimpanzees) are in the phylum Chordata. Chimpanzees are the closest anthropoid relative to humans. Like discussed in the TED lecture, humans and Bonobos share very similar body structures, which has resulted in their placement on the phylogenetic tree. The book seems to defend Savage-Rumbaugh’s hypothesis by stating, “Apes…behavior is more adaptable. And, of course, the apes include humans.” This statement reiterates the key concept that is discussed throughout the entire TED talk.