The Infinite Monkey Cage - When the Monkeys Met the Chimps

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by Dr Jane Goodall DBE, comedian Bill Bailey and primatologist Dr Cat Hobaiter to find out what we've learnt in the 60 years since Jane first discovered the chimpanzees of Gombe. From tool use, to language and even to culture, her revolutionary work has transformed our understanding of our great ape cousins, and ourselves. The panel chat about how far our understanding has come in that time, and talk about their own unique close-up experiences of chimpanzees, macaques and baboons, and Bill gets a masterclass in how to speak Chimp from a true expert!Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage. Now, for a show called The Infinite Monkey Cage, we rarely go beyond primates who are, well, the species theoretical physicist, evolutionary geneticist, or analytic chemist. And some experts are actually even beginning to debate whether physicists should indeed be classified as a separate species. There is increasing evidence to suggest that physicists can breed with biologists. Beijing Zoo recently lent Painton Zoo one of their theoretical physicists for a mating programme, but they appear to be very, very shy.

And they've been allowing them to attempt mating in the dark, but they just don't seem to be able to find the energy. The 14th of July 2020 is the 60th anniversary of what became a landmark achievement in understanding both chimpanzees and human beings, Jane Goodall's first expedition to Gombe. Today, we're asking how has the study of chimpanzees changed our view, not only of their

world and the world around us, but also the world including us? How can we work to protect species that are far more closely linked to us than we previously imagined, and in doing so ultimately better protect ourselves? And as usual in these times, we are joined by an audience of 200, each one sat alone at home. But like a brood of termites, they come together to form an audience. And I hope you don't mind me calling you termites. I'm a big fan of termites and their mounds. So it's in no way an insult as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, we're joined by three primates, all of the classification. Anamalia, Chordata, Mammalia, primate, Hominidae, Homo sapien, and they are... Jane Goodall, ethologist, conservationist, and I think I have to say two things I've learned from the apes just because of what just went before. One thing very relevant to what we're talking about. Chimpanzees love to eat termites, so audience beware. And secondly, which seems very appropriate for people sitting in their separate rooms, in their separate houses, I've learned the distance greeting of the chimpanzee. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh me Jane I am Dr Kat Hobata I'm a primatologist at the University of St Andrews and the most intriguing thing that I've learned from other apes is that every single chimpanzee

group is different so I'm not talking in trivial ways. The tools they use are different, the communication, what they sound like, their political organisation, how they group themselves, all of that is really different. And it's so striking that it's almost impossible to say what a chimpanzee is like, just by looking at one community in exactly the same way as it would be impossible to say what a chimpanzee is like just by looking at one community in exactly the same way as it would be impossible to say what a human is like just by popping up to St Andrews and spending some time here. Hello. It's me, Bill Bailey. Hello, everyone. hello, hello. And my experience really of primates, well, what I want to say about them is that I've had extraordinary encounters with Cape Chakma baboons in South Africa.

I've had up-close encounters with Sulawesi macaques. And on every occasion where I've met primates up close, there's one common thread between all these meetings is that they really, really like me. They like me a lot. And, yeah, they don't know what it is about me, but they seem to really like me. So my wife calls me a missing link.

So there you go. And this is our panel jane we'll start off thinking about it you know 60 years now since uh that that first expedition to gombe and what were your your initial expectations of what you thought you might achieve when that started? Well, quite honestly, I didn't really have any expectations because nobody had done it before. I began wanting to go to Africa and live with wild animals when I was 10 and everybody laughed at me. But I got there and I met Louis Leakey and he asked if I'd go and try and study these chimpanzees living on the lake shore, Lake Tanganyika. He thought it might

help him better understand how early humans might have behaved and so I didn't know what to expect. I literally didn't. I went along the lake in the boat, looked up at the forested hills, wondered how on earth I would find the chimpanzees, and just thought, well, I'm going to do what I would do or what I used to do as a child in England and just go out there and hope to find them and then hope that eventually they'll get used to me and let me sit and watch them close up. And Jane, if we look at the scientific perspective at that time,

so how much did we know about primate behaviour if we go back 50 or 60 years? Well, we knew about it from the zoo, Solly Zuckerman's famous hammer-dryer's baboon study. George Schaller had spent one year studying one particular area for mountain gorillas. There was, I think it was DeVore and Hall who were studying chakma baboons in South Africa. And basically that was it. There was one crazy man, I forget his name. I think it was Garner. And it was ages ago,

I mean, like 150 years ago, he wanted to learn about chimpanzees. So he had a cage made because he was a bit scared of them. And he put it by a fruiting tree. And for some reason, he thought that they might get used to him more quickly if he was naked, so he took his clothes off. And then, for some even more bizarre reason, he decided to cover himself with baboon dung. He didn't see any chimps. Well, I mean, we've all done that. Well, I was going to ask, Bill, in your introduction, you said that they seemed to like you.

Did you have a similar approach? Yes. No, I wasn't naked just before. That would have upset everyone else there. No, I didn't do anything particular. I don't know what it was. They were just very sort of inquisitive, very curious. And they wanted to sort of, you know,

come up and give you a little bit of fist bump or touch my arm or they were just fascinated and it was an amazing experience but no i wasn't naked or covered in um in dung so uh now that's that's really above and beyond that's extraordinary one thing it might have been when the chimpanzees just begun to get used to us we had a visitor it was me and my then husband and a visitor came and he had hair the same color as yours and he had a beard well the chimpanzees had got used to me eventually and you go but we had dark hair and you know yellow hair and so this one chimpanzee came up and he was very nervous because this was a stranger but he looked and he looked he climbed in the tree above and then suddenly he dared to reach down and he touched the white hair

and sniffed his finger so maybe they're interested in your in the color of your hair and your beard yeah yes they did. One of them, it was a young one, he just sort of kind of grabbed it and just ran it through his fingers very, very gently. And I was a little bit nervous, I've got to say apprehensive, because, you know, the macaques are huge. I mean, some of the big males, they've got big teeth. Oh, they have. And certainly, you know, the macaques are huge. I mean, some of the big males are quite, they've got big teeth. Oh, they have. And certainly, you know, they're huge.

And the baboons as well. They're enormous great things. But they sort of, I don't know, I felt there was a kind of, I had an affinity with them. It was extraordinary. It was the most amazing encounter. It's weird because we were talking about a while ago, Bill, you and I were feeding some lions.

Yes. And the lions got on with everyone. It was with our friend Andrea. We weren't feeding them with Andrea. I mean, we were with Andrea, but we weren't using Andrea as the food and working at London Zoo. And you were the only one that when you went over to the lion, the lion reacted.

And we were trying to work out this negative, you know, whether it was either you were an alpha male or just that your hair was maining out quite a lot that morning yeah i think that might have been it i was i was backlit rather rather like you are now i was sort of like backlit with this sort of beautiful golden light and uh primates i'm okay but you know large big the big cats i just don't go near him i was i was i was mauled by well i wasn't mauled but i was you know i was knocked to the ground by a jaguar in brazil when so maybe the big cats don't like me i was in in manaus and there was a sort of uh the army the brazilian army have a sort of jaguar enclosure there and

they were showing me this jaguar. And it was one of these encounters where he said, you know, the jaguar has no natural predators in the jungle, so if you can creep up behind it and it won't make any... It's fine, because it knows it can kill anything. And so he said, you're always approached from the front. And then he said, oh, sorry, never. oh sorry never sorry never you know and it was like and and and he said oh you know my english is not great and but but the thing the thing about it was i did approach from the front and the jaguar

it obviously it saw it took it as a kind of a threat, like a challenge to its authority. And it sort of playfully knocked me to the ground. And I was a little bit scared. And then they all sort of managed to extricate me. But yeah, big cats, no. But primates, yes, they're my friends. Well, Cat, not that we want to make the whole of this show

about the beauty of Bill's lovely hair, but you were mentioning before we started this recording about silverbacks, for instance. If they see, again, a human male with grey hair, they react as well. Is that right? Absolutely. So, yeah, big silverback gorillas. I've known a couple of them who all it would take if you were, was one in a zoo down in port limb who if you had a group of visitors who were coming by if there was um anybody with gray hair or a big beard in that group then you would get the most fantastic displays and of course for gorillas anything that's a sort of silvering of the hair is what happens to them when when they mature so you're

going to be a black back until you get to take over the group and at what point that point your silver comes in um so i reckon you know anybody with a little bit of silver has the potential to be eyeing up the ladies in the group for potential kind of interest so yeah um i mean well that is very much like the way that i operate there hello cat cat in your introduction you um you use words about the the societies these communities of the primates use and words such as political organization and so on which if we go back 60 years um this fed into some controversy about researching primates didn didn't it? Because the idea that they could be in any way close to humans was a controversial idea. Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things that the study of

chimpanzees has done is to put us very firmly in our place and to sort of get rid of these very artificial lines in the sand that we love. You know, humans as a species are a little self-obsessed. We like to know what makes us special. There are lots of things that make us different, but there's really nothing left that makes us special. And it was the study of chimps. And in particular, Jane's work in Gombe and coming in and being able to talk about individuals and to study things like personality and to ask the kind of questions about other animals that we would think about in humans, but never think about in other species, that has allowed us to, every time somebody draws one of those lines in the sand and says, we're the toolmaker,

nope, we're going to rub that out, or we're the language user, nope, we can rub a lot of that out. And it was the study of chimps and the work done at Gombe that really started to break down what was possible to ask as a scientist. You know, we'd have been drummed out of old school Oxbridge for asking the kind of questions that I've spent most of my research career asking. Well, I nearly was. I was nearly. I don't know how I survived arriving in Cambridge, never having been to college to do a PhD in ethology, very nervous. And almost straight away, many of the professors told me, well, first of all, I shouldn't have given the chimpanzees names, numbers were scientific. And I couldn't talk about personality, minds capable of problem solving, and certainly not emotions, because they were unique to us. In fact, it was actually taught back then, probably before you were born,

that the difference between us and all other animals was one of kind. They weren't paying heed to Darwin at all. And I suspect it stemmed originally from religion, the religious impact on science and fortunately and I've got him right here I had this wonderful teacher

when I was a child and he had already taught me that we weren't the only beings with personalities, minds and emotions and so I was able to stand up to it. That was my dog. That's your dog?

Yeah, that's Rusty. That's Rusty. You see him. You know, it's a question to both of you. Given what you've just said, actually, the question we wrote earlier sounds like a ridiculous one. The question was, can you characterise a typical chimpanzee society? And you've just said there's no such thing. They're all individuals. But I wonder if you could paint

a picture for us of maybe a group that you've studied so we can get an idea, a picture in our minds of how they interact with each other. Yeah, absolutely. So I work up in northwestern Uganda in a forest called the Badongo Rainforest. I've been there for about 15 years. I'm really lucky now. I'm one of the generation of primatologists that's gotten to work with lots of different chimpanzee groups. But there are two that I know best because I've known them for the longest. And one is called Sonso and one is called Wybira, they're neighbours. Sonso has about 65 chimps.

Wybira has about 120. Sonso has about 65 chimps. Wybira has about 120. And the sort of backbone of their social organisation are the males, because they're going to stay in the group that they're born into for the rest of their lives. So the friendships and alliances that they build up in childhood are going to do them through their lifetime. And that can be up to 60, 65 years old. In our forest, we've got some really lucky long-lived chimpanzees. Now, the whole group isn't going to be together the whole day. They're going to fission and fuse.

And that means that different individuals are going to come together and join up and split apart. And so we have some chimps that will see each other every day. And we have some chimps that won't see the rest of the group, perhaps for months, maybe even a year or two in the case of some of the females. So they've got all of these different relationships and different bits of information about each other. And so they're going to be going through the rainforest as a community, as a culture, they're going to recognize each other. If I haven't seen you for six months, I'm still going to know you're in my group, and you're not one of the neighbours. And that's one of these things that makes them really special, is just how flexible and how different they are. So Sonso has 10 or 12 adult

males, but in Waibera we have 30 independent males, and it's really rare to get that many boys together. And so because we've got two fundamentally different sets of chimps, we've got two very different social structures, we see all sorts of other different things. We see different tool use, different types of communication, different political strategies. If you want to get the girl in Sonso, you're competing with you, you know, your five buddies. But if you want to get the girl in Waibera, you're competing with 29 other big guys, and you might have to think of a different tactic to to make that work for you and jane when you were observing the the the the group behavior in the social behavior as well how much did you find

yourself seeing that mirrored in in human behavior that that bit again as we mentioned at the beginning what seems to make people uncomfortable a little bit like when queen victoria first saw an aragetan in in london zoo and you know, all too human, uncomfortably human. Did you start to notice this reflective sense of human and chimpanzee? Well, yes, because when one knows nothing about the behavior, knows nothing what to expect. nothing what to expect. But then you see two chimpanzees approaching each other from different directions, and they go up and they put their arms around each other and kiss. I mean, that is such a human-like behavior. It hits you. They're greeting each other. If you see a chimpanzee approach one who's eating some food and hold out a hand like this, palm up. It's begging. It's the same as we do. So constantly

seeing behavior which mirrored human behavior. And I think that was the most fascinating thing about the early days. You know, swaggering, when two males are facing off to each other, they stand upright, they bristle, their faces take on a furious scowl, they may shake their fist, they may actually throw a weapon. But you know, it's so like some male politicians, human male politicians. And then, you know, you get intelligent chimpanzees who work things out and have a strategy. Others who are big and boisterous and bullies, and they don't seem to think much. And interestingly, the ones who use their brains, the males,

tend to get to a high position and stay there, whereas the big, aggressive bullies get to a high position, but they don't stay there because they haven't got the political skill to weave their way through the complexities of Jim's society. So very, very different, Bill, to our societies. Well, you know, it's fascinating listening to you, Jane and Kat, because my brief sort of time where I experienced these baboon societies was exactly that. I just was fascinated by how complex their social interactions are. You know, there was a sort of, and they mirrored a human, a little human group. There was a, you know, the alpha male and he, and, you know, he would swagger around and bully the other males. But then, you know, he had his female, but the female was having little sort of side affairs with some of the other males and platonic relationships, and then there was a little bit of babysitting going on.

It was extraordinary to see it. That's something which really, as you say, it starts to blur the lines between what we consider to be human behaviour, primate behaviour. We're very similar. You spent a long time with baboons in South Africa, didn't you Bill? You made a, was it an eight part series? So did you feel that you'd only just scratched the surface? How long did you spend with them?

We were there, I guess, we were there for a few weeks, probably, yeah, nearly a month I suppose, and but I mean, yes, you just start to realise, I mean firstly, you know, how they're extraordinary creatures powerful incredibly bright intelligent and you know they figured they they were being sort of um pushed out of their their

traditional range their area because of you know human encroachment there was you know as is a kind of a common thing around the world. There was development, new housing was being built, and so they were being forced out. And so that meant there was these sort of human-baboon interactions, which were the baboons sort of coming off worse because of it, because the baboons are just doing what they do, and they adapt to behavior. Suddenly there's this source of food.

Having to go out and forage for hours and hours and hours in the bush for you know for sort of low return vegetation suddenly there's all these humans turning up with chicken key eggs and sandwiches and paninis they're like oh well we'll have some of that then and they were just and these the melba bones they learned how to operate the doors of the cars which was extraordinary to watch And then they'd figured out when they were locked, they were like, oh, that's locked, don't even bother with that. And then he even figured out when the little dongle of the alarm went off,

like, beep, beep, like that, oh, that's locked, don't even bother with that. So they figured out all these extraordinary things. This one fella said to me, he goes, listen, you know, he goes, I like them. I like the baboons, you know, I like them. But they are rascals.

They are rascals. And he said, he came, I came down into my kitchen one night and there was a baboon. And the baboon was standing in his kitchen with the fridge door open, just looking in the fridge, just up and down you know is anything there i like and he goes and he didn't take anything and i was i stood there i was like take what you want you can have it but i mean you know the the the problem is is that yes i mean the serious side of it is of course their behavior has led to them being you know like you know that kind of that expression too clever for your own good and that's what happened you know some of them were getting were were well they weren't terrorizing but they were just taking food people are so stupid people are so stupid there's signs that maybe don't take food

in don't take food just avoid them and because people do and the baboons just go oh i'll have that then and then people start shrieking and oh the baboons taking my food and then the male baboons the larger aggressive ones a couple of them were euthanized because of this you know and that's where that's where it's really tragic you know it's because uh and this sort of this kind of clash this collision is just gonna is just like a happening everywhere isn't it it's like a sort of microcosm what's what's fascinating at Gombe we've had a baboon study going ever since 1966 and I've had students studying chimps and baboons and the difference you know the chimps are like really conservative they're not going to touch a new food because it's it's not they know. And if an infant is wanting to taste a piece of human food,

the mother or an older sibling will pit it away. And then you've got the baboons who are so entrepreneurial and, you know, immediately trying anything that looks edible, they'll try it. So the students were saying, well, clearly humans are a mixture. They're half chimp and half baboon. Kat, when we use terms like culture and perhaps we talk about education, learning, teaching, these terms in human society certainly imply a sort of a persistence of information from generation to generation,

perhaps some kind of ratchets of information. Is that appropriate? Is that an appropriate way to look at chimpanzee and baboon cultures? Or is that, I don't know, projecting too sophisticated behaviour on them? No, they can absolutely learn from each other. And I think one of the things that is fascinating to me at the moment is that what we've tended to do when we're looking at culture is we've looked horizontally. So we've looked at differences between group A and group B in the same way as, you know, you might look at cultural differences between England and France or something. But the one thing that we're starting finally to be able to do with great apes is look longitudinally. So in human culture, obviously, we also have that

passing on to the next generation. And, you know, our grandparents and our great grandparents' culture was very different to the one we see today. And great apes are so similar to us. They live incredibly long lives. And that means that even though research with them started now, 60 or more years ago, it's only really recently that we've been able to start to look longitudinally and say, all right, well, what happens over generations? How does that change? But we know that they can learn from each other. And I think for a long time, the way in which people started to try and tackle those questions was to set up all sorts of very clever experiments, often in captivity under some pretty unusual conditions. And typically they'd fail. And then everybody would point and go, oh, look, the chimp failed to do it. And therefore they are different to humans. They can't learn like we do. They don't learn socially. And as somebody who didn't have a primatology background before going out and spending time with wild primates, I would look at those experiments

later as a primatologist and go, yeah, but why would they? I mean, what's the point? Why would a chimpanzee have any interest, have any motivation? It's completely irrelevant. And I think it's really been through these, you know, over the last few decades, these studies in the wild where we can see how they behave with each other, behavior that's relevant to them. You know, a chimpanzee in the forest where I work in Bodongo is not going to crack nuts with stones because we have no stones and we have no nuts. So it's a highly irrelevant type of tool use for them. I've just spent some time out in West Africa with groups that do.

And it's fascinating to see the children watching mum do it and nicking the nuts as they go. Of course, that she's cracking and all of that. It's interesting because I remember having a conversation with um a scientist studying orangutans and so they have complex behavior build nests and so on and and i said you know that how did the the children the babies learn to do this that they they learn that behavior but they drew us that told me that i should draw a distinction between between learned learning so so the the children copying the the parents and learning from them, and teaching, which is an altruistic, a much more complex behaviour.

That's absolutely true. But one thing that I would say, well, there's two things. I'll get on my little scientific pedant rant here. So number one is the active teaching, this idea that we come and we shape somebody else's knowledge. We can do it, we do it all the time, but it's not necessarily a human universal. There are human cultures in which observation, sitting quietly watching a skilled person do something, is exactly how you learn. So it's something we can do, but it's not necessarily the only way

that we learn as humans. And I think you could probably say exactly the same for chimps, except for probably it's the other way around. So most of chimpanzee learning from what we've studied and seen and from what I've seen as well is that they do this sort of master apprenticeship. You watch very, very carefully what goes on. what goes on. There are starting to be, and there's a site called Gualugu out in Congo, where they're starting to see some really lovely evidence for the teachers, the parents, usually in this case, mums or older brothers and sisters, incurring a slight cost to facilitating their children's learning. So in this case, they would be termite fishing, they might have their tool with them, and they'll snap it in half and give half to their children. Now, in some ways, that's fairly sort of simple first step, but they're incurring a cost on their ability to go termite fishing in order to facilitate their children's. And so I think

there's evidence for both kinds of teaching and learning in both species. And it's just that perhaps we, particularly in the West, in terms of cultural differences, Western humans teach in a certain way. But that's not necessarily a universal for us, just as it's not necessarily a universal for chimps. Well, that's what you talked about, you know, with the mother snapping a tool in half or something like that. I want them to also look at the persistence of the child, because if you're trying to fish for termites and you have a really irritatingly persistent infant, let's, for heaven's sake, give him half the tool

or give him the whole tool and I'll get another and then I'll get on better. And they haven't done that, because all the years we've been at Gombe watching tool using with termite fishing, ant fishing, you know, we've never seen teaching. We've seen behavior that you could say, well, maybe the mother meant to do that, but then equally she might not have.

But certainly, you know, what's so wonderful is watching the infant, and then when they're very small, they know what to do. One of them, when the termites come out over the surface of the termite nest, the parent, the tool user, will often mop up with the back of the wrist and eat the termites off. So this one little one, he was about nine months, much too young to use tools. He mopped everything. He mopped his knee.

He mopped his mother's head. Then he began using tools, but they were usually that long instead of this long. Or else he'd pick, he got one stick so big, he pushed it in, but he couldn't get it out. So, you know, to watch them gradually learning and getting more efficient. And can you imagine, imagine cat how i was greeted with the scientific community when i dared to talk about culture in 1963 i was hounded out of you know i wasn't i wasn't the right sort of person for good scientific society some of the other things i said, yeah, I wasn't. Because what I find watching a few things just before doing this show in terms of the increased level of understanding the possibilities of communication seems remarkable now. The language, which we might have in the past had

very basic ideas of what the gesturing seems to be again far more intricate than you would have ever imagined just from some casual observation that you have to go very deeply inside into a community into a society to to start to understand that that language that exists Jane well some of it's easy and some of it's much harder and And also, you know, different individuals have slightly different ways of using the same gesture. And so, I mean, we're still learning. I mean, look, we're 60 years now. Next month is the 60th anniversary of the day I first arrived in Gombe. And we're still learning. And the big advantage

now is that we can, you know, there's two different types of chimps. There are good chimpanzee mothers and less good ones and a very few bad ones. And now we can look back over 60 years. And it's very clear that the good mothers and the main thing is that they're supportive they support their infants even if they run in to intervene when their child is getting into trouble and they know they're going to be beaten up by a higher ranking mother

but they still do it and the offspring of those mothers are more likely to do better so the males get a higher position in the hierarchy they're more assertive more confident probably sour more offspring as a result. And the females are better mothers. So that's the advantage of this long-term study.

Kat, quite a lot of your work has been looking at that, hasn't it? I think the first time I saw it was probably on the Christmas lectures. You appeared on one of those showing, again, it's just, can you give us some of the ideas of the kind of message which can be passed between chimpanzees? So an awful lot of the time when I talk about communication, what I do is draw parallels to human language. And I'm saying, okay, how are we different?

How are we similar? But frankly, an awful lot of the time, what I'm really interested in is not its parallels to human language, but what understanding chimpanzee communication tells me about being a chimpanzee, because that's the little sort of insight, that's being able to get a little bit into their minds. And I think we can, when we first spent time with chimps, when I first spent time with chimpanzees, it was very distracting because certainly our group can be extremely noisy. It's very high drama. There will be pant hoots in the morning, but also I noticed you're in a big feeding tree full of figs

and there will be barks and screams and yells. And it turns out that the entire thing was because this guy dropped the one fig that he really wanted, despite being surrounded by figs, but that was the fig he really wanted and all hell breaks loose. I mean, they're absolute drama queens at times. But what I've spent most of my work studying is their gestures, their nonverbal communication. And the reason that I find that so fascinating is that for me a lot of the vocalizations are about this sort of broadcast I'm hungry I'm frightened hello it's broadcasting of emotion but what they do with their gestures with these ways in which they move their body

is all of the little subtleties of the day-to-day it's's asking for something. It's saying, come here, groom me, let's go. Let's be friends or get lost, go away, stop stealing my food. All of these... That's the one. I have to apologise. Apologise if the silverback has told me not to. No, it's just so wonderful for the radio listeners.

There's a sign language conversation going on between Jane and Kat now, which is fabulous. I'd like to do an impression. Phil's already taught me how to do a good impression. That's what I really want to do. Like that. Well, Bill, why don't you give us what you've got, your best panting so far.

Like that's me just sort of saying hello but would it be right so jane are you able to pick up on where bill's getting it right and where he's getting it well again for the radio listeners that was still bill the loud you know what it really was still bill even radio listeners go, that's definitely the sound of Bill. That's still James. James? Well, I wasn't totally clear exactly what sounds Bill was making. So it's hard to comment.

Really? Bill, we can have it one more time, and let's just see. I'll tell you what, we'll find out from Kat and from Jane what they think you're saying, and you can tell us afterwards what you're trying to express. Yeah, and also, are you in chimp or baboon language? Because they're different. Oh, OK.

I was speaking, yes, a sort of conversational chimp. Not formal. It wasn't formal it was just hey how you doing you've got to break out your BBC chimpanzee yeah okay I was just going that's more like All right, now let's get the translation. Jane, what do you interpret Bill was attempting to say?

Well, I think at this point I need to say that every chimpanzee has a different voice. So we'll let Bill communicate in Bill's way. It doesn't mean we have to necessarily understand it. Yes, thanks, Jane. It's a great news for the comedy clubs there, isn't it? We didn't have a clue what Bill was doing, but we allowed him to do the show anyway. It was fine.

We're doing a bit of new material. Could you perhaps teach Bill a greeting or a phrase or an authentic, a more authentic sound? Well, I mean, the close-up greeting is very, very easy, and it's just... That's right, like a pant, yeah? And then the one we did before. Go away.

Get lost. I can do that. Yeah, go away. And what about hello, good evening? Or hello, what's a greeting? Well, I did the greeting. A classic greeting. I started the greeting, didn't I?

Oh, yeah. People always forget that they mustn't take a breath. It's all one breath. OK, I'll try that again. I mean, I'm sort of getting there. You see, look, it's responding. All the audience are responding in the gym. You'll be able to subscribe to Bill's language course

that will be available in shops from October. That's it. Can I ask a marginally more serious question, perhaps? I think we've been dealing with this very seriously, Brian, to be honest. No, but related, are those greetings and hand gestures universal or are they local to each group, each individual group? I think it's very similar to, well, human language makes a really nice analogy in that the basic building blocks. human language makes a really nice analogy in that the basic building blocks. So every group will use a pant hoot, that loud kind of call, and every group will greet either with a pant or a pant grunt, if you want to put a little respect on your greeting. But the way in which you do that,

the sound of it, the rhythm of it, the tone of it is going to be different for individuals and groups so i can tell if i hear a pant hoot if it's a santo pant hoot or if it's a wibera pant hoot as well as whether or not it happens to be frank or james who's pant hooting they've got a unique group level identity so chimpanzees and bonobo gestures they all have about 70 or 80 gestures but the overlap between the species is about 90%, and it's about 80% chimps and gorillas. And it had always bothered me that if a chimpanzee and a gorilla overlaps... Now, we always know that chimps are our closest relatives,

but we forget that we're also their closest relatives. They're much more closely related to us than they are to a gorilla. So if a chimpanzee and a gorilla has a behavior in common, it really strongly suggests that we at some point should have had that behavior in common too. And of course, I mean, I move my hands more than most people, but we don't tend to express a lot through gesture today. But we did a little pilot study with some very young children, one and two year olds, who were just not quite with their full language skills online yet. Thinking that some of these gestures that are familiar with us, you know, putting your arm in the air or reaching out your

hand to beg for something, we might pick up there. And we actually found a huge number of the chimpanzee and gorilla gestures in these really young children. So it looks like all of us share these fundamental building blocks, and then we've just used them in different ways to make different kind of systems, either as a species or as a group and a culture. And you know, that's why Leakey sent me to study chimps, because he wanted to have a better feeling for how stone age humans might have behaved. So given a common ancestor, ape-like, human-like, what, 6 million years ago, something like that, that probably if there were similarities in chimps and humans today,

maybe the game was inherited from that common ancestor. So then he thought, now I can picture how these prehistoric humans might have lived. Annoyingly, we're almost out of time. And I want to move on, though, to make sure that we do cover also conservation, because I know, Jane, it was the mid-'80s, about 1986, where you became increasingly aware that this was one of the major issues in terms of both chimpanzees you've been working with and across the world. What do you think are the things that we are not aware enough of in terms of the nature of our ecosystem and its precarious

and why we should be thinking more and more on conservation and the things that you've seen up close. Well, because we're losing the rainforest where the great apes live at the rate of about a football field across the world per second. So, you know, we've lost half of our tropical rainforest approximately. I can't remember in how many years. lost half of our tropical rainforest approximately i can't remember in how many years and all the great apes are endangered some of them are you know very endangered indeed like the west african chimpanzee the gorillas are just losing out to the oil palm plantations and it's you know it's the big companies coming in logging and mining it's the roads that are being made through the forest. It's the wildlife trafficking where mother apes are shot to steal the babies,

to sell them for entertainment or for pets, to shoot them for bushmeat, for food. And, of course, it's this trafficking of wild animals, not just apes, but other wild animals too. It's the butchering of them in the African forests that led to the HIV AIDS pandemic. to meat markets, wild animal meat markets in Asia, that's led to the SARS epidemic and now to the COVID-19 pandemic. And you get this spillover of a virus, or it could be a bacteria, from an animal to a person. And then when it bonds with something in a cell in a human body, you get a new disease, and that new disease might be contagious,

passing from the person who's got this new combination to another person, and that's what's happened with COVID-19. But, you know, we've got to realize it's our disrespect of the environment, the cutting down the forest, pushing animals in closer contact with each other, providing opportunities for the spillover of a virus to an animal. And it can also happen in

our intensive farms as well. And the next pandemic, I mean, we've been relatively lucky. This was incredibly contagious, this pandemic. But the percentage of people who catch it and die is relatively low. But imagine the next one, and there will be another if we continue to disrespect animals and the environment. Imagine one with a death rate more comparable to Ebola. That's going to be a total nightmare. But are we going to learn? We haven't been listening to the scientists studying these zoonotic diseases.

We haven't been listening, and it ties in with climate change, which is an existential threat. We'll get through the pandemic, but climate change, unless we change our behavior, is going to be the end of life on Earth as we know it. So, you know, this for me is why conservation is so important. And it's why this program I began for young people, Roots and Shoots, which is now in 65 countries growing, and it's all over the UK.

It's a program of the Jane Goodall Institute. And so getting young people to understand the importance of protecting nature because we're part of the natural world just because we live in the middle of a city doesn't mean we're not dependent on the natural world because we are for clean air and clean water

and for food and clothing and all the rest of it so is this pandemic going to be a turning point or will we go back to business as usual? Are we going to learn? We're supposed to be the most intellectual creature that's ever lived. The biggest difference with us and chimps,

you know, we can send rockets to Mars. Are we going to learn? I just wanted to end on, because it was actually the first question we were going to ask you, and now we've got to the end, we might as well get to question one for you, which was, you know, you have a zoo, and you are using that as well for certain elements of kind of conservation protection of animals. Yeah, I mean, it's not really a it's i mean we say that as a joke it's a kind of a it's a name for it but we we're we're a sort of a rescue center um and we are a small collection uh we have a small collection of animals and uh some of them it's interesting what you were talking about following on from that are trafficked animals that were impounded and then what are they going to do and some no sometimes they're euthanized. And we have a small facility here where we can just say,

no, we're going to look after these animals. We're going to give them a good life. We have an interesting mix of parrots and, as I said, the small primates. And we've got giant pigeons, tortoises. You might hear them in a minute kicking against the wall. They're amazingly loud, tortoises. They've really got some power in their legs.

When they want to get out, you know. What the hell's that? Oh, that's a tortoise, you know. They're doing his Zumba. Do you think it might be kind of a Morse code? Do you think they're trying to communicate? I don't know. Yeah, what's that? But Bill, the male mating draws back and then boom,

into the lady to get for mating. Yes, maybe that's what's going on. Do you think there's some tortoise action going on here, Jane? Yes, our two tortoises always decided to do this performance when my grandmother brought some of her friends, elderly friends, to tea out of the garden. Of course. Oh, look, have a look at the top.

Oh, hang on. We constantly return to your flirtation with various different species, Bill. It's very beautiful images you have given to the audience, very pastoral and beyond. We also asked our audience a question. Bill. It's very beautiful images you have given to the audience. Very pastoral and beyond. We also asked our audience a question. We want to know from our audience what species do you think would be

the best one to take over the world? And these are the answers that we have had so far. So what species do you think would be best to take over the world? Chin says owls. It would be a hoot. And they'd be able to form a functioning parliament. Now, there's two.

You might have missed it there because you got the hoot punt, but then the addition of functioning parliament is a typical, it was a classic Radio 4 thing there. There's a pun, but there's also information and education. There's everything going on in that one. What have you got, Brian? Dan Sawyer said, Irish setters. That way things can only get setter.

And following on, actually, following on, Matt Sullivan has C. B. Ream, because things can only get wetter. So C. B. Ream, there we go. This is... Christopher Parker just says, almost any species, but based on mankind's performance

preferably the female of that one um this is the the most the most agonizing but brilliant i think pun is the one from from deon smith who says llamas because they'll survive the alpacalypse llamas because they'll survive the alpacalypse the al yeah i know that's a lot of work that's gone into that uh so um thank you very much to uh our panel uh bill bailey dr kat hobater and dr jane goodall and next week we are asking what's the time we're not robin we're asking what is time oh okay right that's uh more problematic uh but i think it's reasonably easy time is the measurement of the passing of events in the direction of order to increased disorder there we are done no it's more complicated than that actually and less certain i i think i would rather say we don't know do you know sometimes when i listen to

talking i regret buying a watch thanks Thanks very much for listening, everyone, and bye-bye. Turn that nice again. Hello, I'm Tim Harford, the presenter of More or Less. And I believe that if you want to understand the world, which is a very big, very complicated place, then numbers are an absolutely essential tool. They're like a telescope for an astronomer or an X-ray machine for a radiographer.

Numbers answer questions we can't answer in any other way, such as how safe is a home birth? And yes, we check the facts. What are those lying politicians lying to us about this week? So please subscribe to More or Less and let numbers light up your world. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts.