![]() ![]() Lucy, the Human Chimp, written and directed by Alex Parkinson, puts forward Carter to share what happened next.Ĭarter had been a 25-year-old psychology student within the University of Oklahoma’s chimp research project when, in 1976, she answered the Temerlins’ advertisement for a part-time carer for Lucy. Much has been made of Lucy’s story, including an episode of the acclaimed Radiolab podcast. Read more: Man raised alongside chimps says it should never happen againĮventually, the Temerlins came to regard the chimp as their daughter. Primatologist Roger Fouts, whose success teaching a chimp named Washoe a form of American Sign Language was heavily publicised in 1970, likewise taught Lucy a vocabulary of around 100 signs (though the extent of apes’ comprehension of signing remains disputed). The Temerlins brought Lucy up in their home more or less as though she was a human child, to the point of teaching her to dress herself, eat with silverware and even fix a gin and tonic. Through the late 1960s, Lucy was the subject of a high-profile study by psychologists Maurice and Jane Temerlin, ostensibly to explore the limits of nature versus nurture. Lucy, the Human Chimp, a new TV documentary from KEO Films and Channel 4, explores the meeting of those worlds through the story of one unique relationship: that between Lucy, a chimpanzee raised as a human, and Janis Carter, a graduate student hired to clean her cage. Through the 20th century, the study of chimpanzees in particular was a way to learn about ourselves: how we might fare in space, for example, and how we might communicate in the absence of a common tongue. "When a wild chimpanzee finds a skull, it will likely be attentive to it like no other inanimate object in his surroundings as it bears a resemblance to one of its own," Gonçalves concludes.So much is now known about our similarities to other primates, it is easy to forget that, until relatively recently, we were still establishing exactly where we humans ended and apes began. The results show that not only do the chimpanzees show the most preference for chimpanzee faces, they also show a similar bias towards chimpanzee skulls, looking the longest and most intently at the teeth.Īlthough the research team does not conclusively determine whether chimpanzees "know" they are holding a Yorick in their hands, there is room for speculation about what is going on in the chimpanzees' minds. To test their hypotheses about chimpanzees' visual attention, Gonçalves and his team conducted a series of three experiments using an eye-tracker to map exactly where the chimpanzees are looking and for how long. "Chimpanzee skulls, on the other hand, still retain the general facial arrangements," he adds. But elephant skulls lose many important facial traits such as ears and the trunk which are important for their communication. In 2006, Karen McComb and her team at the University of Sussex found that African elephants showed more interest in skulls and tusks than in any other stimuli.īut the mechanisms might not have been the same.Īccording to Gonçalves, wild elephants probably interacted with these skulls based on past experiences. These findings, which are published in Royal Society Open Science, matched previous field experiments done with African elephants. "This explains why we see illusory faces in things like clouds and rocks, and primate skulls are as face-like as anything in nature," adds Gonçalves. ![]() Simply stated, chimpanzees seem to know when a skull is chimpanzee-like, relating to the phenomenon of pareidolia that is linked to the brain's ability to detect faces. The researchers posit that chimpanzee skulls possess face-like cues, general contours, and the overall eye-nose-teeth arrangement that likely activates a network of brain regions originally evolved to detect and process faces. "We used images of faces, skulls, and skull-shaped stones representing four different species," says Gonçalves. The recent field of comparative thanatology has delved into this kind of question.Ī Kyoto University team led by André Gonçalves has now tested chimpanzees' visual attention to a series of images of conspecific and non-conspecific skulls. But do chimpanzees show recognition and preferences in the case of conspecific skeletons belonging to their own species? Previously, the scientific community has given little attention to this, perhaps assuming that chimpanzees have little or no knowledge of chimpanzee skeletal anatomy. ![]()
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