Bonobo

Okay, maybe they pause, but with words, it becomes much more difficult to know the ending and the beginning of a word.

And so when we speak, we do make s- very, very slight pauses, but they're so imperceptible to the conscious brain that maybe it w- just w- wasn't something that people thought that the thing that comes out of our mouth also has pauses and hence we need to mark this somehow.

However, there is evidence for, um, in ancient, uh, Persia, I think, they, the cuneiform kind that they were using, they had wedges f- you know, sp- specific wedges for beginning and end of a word.

So they would em- you know, embrace a word.

For example, they just flash, like, one word on the screen, which is super against the biology actually of reading because of recursion.

You know, 25% of the time we go back and we reread, again, without really consciously noticing.

Our brain does that, and I don't think as far as I know right now we have found out why that is happening and also exactly which words- Are being reread.

And so it's kind of a bit of a miracle, but it's necessary, and it's happening for all of us.

And matriarchy is though, like where we do hold those accountable, people who cross the line, there is accountability because matriarchy isn't just all softness either, right? It's protection.

Look up the Bonobo monkeys if you want more inspiration there.

It's mother bear.

It's lioness.

...

while you're listening to Bonobo.

Oh.

But anyway, um, that's, I think it's an important, I think they sh- I think...

Miles, is there a song that you think that people might enjoy?

Yes.

It's funny because I was, I had another song, but then you mentioned Bonobo, and I was like, "Man, I used to fuck with Bonobo-

Yeah

Yeah.

by the lady, Bonobo.

Whoa, hang on.

How do they resolve conflict with sexual behaviour?

So, for example, heterosexual men turned on by images of women, gay men turned on by images of men, and so on.

For women, what she discovered was, whilst those patterns were still prevalent, that women were turned on by so many more of the images and things that they were shown, even Bonobo's mating images.

So it was this, and she calls it the non-specificity of female arousal.

And it's so beautiful because I think particularly for women, our pleasure and eroticism is a turn on for life.

So it unfortunately seems pretty unlikely that we'll be able to reliably teach other animals to speak a human language because there's always some kind of Clever Hans effect or straight up lying trainers taking place, except maybe for one animal that might have had the ability to pass a different test.

[gentle music] Kanzi is a bonobo, and look team, that is a criminally unheard of species.

Bonobo are also called dwarf chimpanzees, and they are tied with chimpanzees as being the most closely related species to humans alive today.

We share about 98.7% of our DNA in common with bonobos.

Kanzi was not only the most devilishly handsome man, he also learned hundreds of symbols in a written language.

And during this time where they were worrying about their funding, some complaints were surfacing.

12 former staff members who'd become known as the Bonobo 12 went to the board with a letter alleging that that researcher, Savage Rambow, herself wasn't fit to be running the care of these animals, these creatures.

And what they claimed was really bizarre.

So the Bonobo 12 alleged that she'd taken the Bonobos on car rides off-site, that she let them play unsupervised with puppies, that there was an unvaccinated infant bonobo that had been exposed to visitors, that it could have been carrying diseases, that she told people she believed that there were people hiding in the bushes near the facility, that they were waiting to slash her tires.

that she'd said on camera in an interview that she slept and bathed alongside the apes.

And this started to make headlines.

But the lawyers of the trust would say that nothing of this nature was substantiated.

But it was a kind of very dark saga in the animal world.