Untrue by Wednesday Martin

Author:Wednesday Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

Bonobos are highly affiliative and altruistic, meaning they love hanging out together and will put themselves out for other bonobos, Amy Parish was telling me. We were standing at the windows of the bonobo enclosure. Parish, who is from Saint Joseph, Michigan, but has embraced the ethos of Southern California, where she moved in 1990, wore sunglasses with heart-shaped lenses and spoke with a singsongy, SoCal inflection. She told me who was who in the troop. When the bonobos caught sight of her, a few of them made a beeline toward us and then reached up to the glass, as if to touch her hand through it. Parish did the same. She told me about experiments she had recently begun with the bonobos in Stuttgart, playing video of them and humans doing various things to figure out which videos and activities they preferred watching (in a follow-up interview, she told me they had loved videos of humans doing modern dance and hated videos of leopards, humans dancing like snakes, and the zoo’s vet, which moved them to kick and slap the video monitor). I was surprised that bonobos liked watching bonobo videos. Laughing, Parish put her camera up to the window and played back some video she had just taken of a juvenile bonobo who was particularly interested in us. It was immediately transfixed, face pressed against the glass, staring at the movie. “Yes. It’s you,” Parish said, speaking directly to the bonobo, laughing again. Parish has an initially disconcerting way of “chatting with” the apes so that, in spite of knowing of her reputation, when I first saw her do it I had a flash of anxiety that I had possibly flown across the country to hang out with someone slightly nuts. What I quickly realized, however, is that her feelings of connection to the bonobos come from her science, and vice versa. Empathy and to a certain extent identification with these primates, along with rigorous training, a passion for data, and extensive knowledge, are what have made it possible for Parish to generate the remarkable insights she has about their behavior, and in the process upend some of our fundamental understanding of ourselves. At one point, as the bonobos were being fed, a high-ranking female named Loretta caught sight of Parish and became visibly excited. She charged to the edge of a large outcropping she was standing on to be as close to us as possible and then repeatedly lifted her chin in a head-bob gesture remarkably like a teenager saying, “What’s up?” Parish did it back, and they repeated this back and forth for a good minute. Then Loretta clapped her hands together and touched her head. Parish did the same thing. Loretta repeated the gesture but touched her mouth after, and so did Parish. When I asked what she was doing, Parish explained, “Basically, she’s saying, ‘What’s up?’ And when I do the gestures back, it’s a way of greeting and reestablishing a rapport.” Loretta, whom Parish told me is one of her favorite bonobos, was clearly sweet on Parish too.

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