When the Monkeys Met the Chimps

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Hello, I'm Robin Itz.

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 Zhou recently lent Payton Zoo, one of their theoretical physicists, for a mating program, 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 Gombay.

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, Animalia, Cordata, Mammalia, Primates, Hominidae, Homeo 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.

Me, Jane.

I am Dr.

Cat Hobeta.

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 human is like just by popping up to St.

Andrews and spending some time here.

Hello.

Hello.

It's me,

Bill Bailey.

Hello, everyone.

Great to be here.

Hello, Bill.

Hi, hello, hello.

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 Chackma 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: 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 I don't know.

My wife calls me a missing link.

So there you go.

And this is our panel.

Jane, we'll start off thinking about

60 years now since

that first expedition to Gombe.

And what were 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 Tanganika.

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 zoos, Solly Zuckerman's famous Hamadryas baboon study.

George Schaler 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 Ghana,

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 gonna ask Bill in your introduction you said that they seem to like you did you have a similar approach yes no I wasn't naked just before

that would that would have been what I would upset everyone else there

No, I didn't do anything particular.

I don't know what it was.

I just they were just very sort of inquisitive, very curious.

And they wanted to sort of, you know, come up and give you a little kind 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

dung.

So

that's really above and beyond.

I mean, that's extraordinary.

One thing it might have been,

when the chimpanzees had 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 colour 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 colour of your hair and and your beard.

Yeah.

Yes, they did.

They sort of, 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, I was, I mean, I was a little bit nervous, I gotta say, apprehensive.

Because, 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 iron affinity with them

they seemed very they was it was extraordinary it's the most amazing encounter it's weird because we were talking about a while ago uh Bill you and I were feeding some lions yes and 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 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 maning out quite a lot that morning.

Yeah, I think that might have been it.

I was, I was backlit,

rather like you are now.

I was sort of like backlit with this sort of

beautiful golden light.

And primates, I'm okay, but you know, large, big, the big cats, I just don't go near them.

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.

So maybe the big cats don't like me.

I was in Manaus, and there was a sort of,

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, you can creep up behind it and it won't, it won't make any, it's fine because it just knows it can kill anything.

And so he said, you'll always approach from the front and then he said 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 obviously it it sort it took it as a kind of a a threat like a challenge to its authority and it sort of playfully knocked me to the ground and um it was quite i was a little bit scared

And then they all sort of managed to, you know,

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, there was one in a zoo down in Port Lim.

Who, if you had a group of visitors who were coming by, if there was anybody with grey 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 they mature.

So you're going to be a blackback until you get to take over the group, and at what point that point your silver comes in.

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,

I mean.

But that is very much like the way that I operate there.

Hello.

Kat, in your introduction,

you use words about the societies, these communities of primates,

and words such as political organization and so on, which if we go back 60 years,

this fed into some controversy about researching primates, 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, no, we can rub a lot of that out.

And it was the study of chimps and the work done at Gompe 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, me well first of all I shouldn't have given the chimpanzees names numbers was 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.

I mean, I'm

so I work up in northwestern Uganda in a forest called the Badongo Rainforest.

I've been there for about fifteen 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 Waibera, they're neighbours.

Sonso has about sixty five chimps.

Waibera has about one hundred and twenty.

And the sort of backbone of their social organization 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, not 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 Wibera 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

your five buddies.

But if you want to get the girl in Wybera, you're competing with 29 other big guys, and you might have to think of a different tactic to make that work for you.

And Jane, when you were observing

the group behaviour and the social behavior as well, how much did you find yourself seeing that mirrored in human behavior?

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 orgatane in London Zoo and found it, 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, 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 behaviour.

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 behaviour which mirrored human behaviour.

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 the intelligent chimpanzees who work things out and have a strategy, others who are big and boisterous and and bullies and they don't seem to think much.

And interestingly, the ones who use their brains, the males, tend to get uh 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 to weave their way through the complexities of chimp society so very very different bill to um

to our societies

well but do you know it's it's fascinating uh listening to you you uh jane and cat because the my

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 the the a 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, it was extraordinary to see it.

And,

yeah, no, that's that's something which really

is, as you say, I mean, it sort of starts to blur the lines between what we consider to be, you know, human behavior, primate behavior.

It's, we're, we're very similar.

You spent a long time with baboons in South Africa, didn't you, Bill?

You made an eight-part series.

So, how did you feel that you don't just scratch the surface?

How long did you spend with them?

We were there, I guess, we were there for a few weeks, probably nearly a month, I suppose.

But, I mean, yes, you just start to realize,

I mean, firstly, you know, how they're extraordinary creatures, powerful, incredibly bright and intelligent.

And, you know, they'd figured they were being being sort of

pushed out of 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,

you know, 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, you know, 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 kievs and sandwiches and paninis.

They're like, oh, well, we'll have some of that then.

And they were just, and these the male baboons, 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, beep, like that, oh, that's locked, don't even bother with that.

You know, so they figured out all these extraordinary things.

This one fella said to me, he goes, 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, like just up up and down.

You know, there's anything there I like.

And he goes, and he didn't take anything.

And I stood there, I was like, take what you want, you can have it.

But I mean, you know,

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 clap that expression, too clever for your own good.

And that's what happened.

You know, some of them were being, were, were, were,

well, that were terrorizing, but they were just taking food.

People were so stupid.

people are so stupid there's signs up everywhere don't take food in don't take food just avoid them and of course people do and the baboons just go oh well 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 euthanased 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 kind of is just like a happening everywhere isn't it it's like a sort of microcosm.

What's fascinating at Gombi, 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 not anything they know.

And if an infant is wanting to taste a piece of human food, the mother will, 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.

Cats, when we use terms like culture and perhaps if we talk about education, learning, teaching,

these terms in human society certainly imply sort of a persistence of information from generation to generation, perhaps some kind of ratchet of information.

Is that appropriate?

Is that an appropriate way to look at chimpanzee and baboon cultures?

Or are we 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 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

a scientist studying orangutans.

And so they have complex behaviour, build nests, and so on.

And I said, you know, how do the children, the babies, learn to do this, that they learn that behaviour.

But

that told me that I should draw a distinction between

learned learning, so the children copying 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 that 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.

There are starting to be, and there's a site called Guolugu 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 a fairly sort of simple first step, 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 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 Gombi watching tool using with termite fishing, ant fishing, you know, we've never seen teaching.

We've seen behaviour 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, Kat, 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 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's 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 start to understand that language that exists, Jane.

Well, some of it's easy and some of it's much harder.

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 chimpanzees.

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 high-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 sire 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 spend 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 know 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 gesture, is their non-verbal 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 emotion.

I'm hungry, I'm frightened, hello,

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 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

I have to apologise.

Apologize if it's overback.

You just told me not.

It's just so wonderful for the radio, 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.

Can somebody teach me how to do a good impression?

That's where I really want to do it.

Like that.

What's

why don't you give us what you've got

your best pant heat so far?

Like, that's me

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 wrong?

Well,

again, for the radio listeners, that was still Bill.

The loud

do you know what?

It really was still Bill.

Even the radio listeners go, that's definitely the sound of Bill.

That's still there.

Jane.

Well, I'm

I wasn't totally clear exactly what sounds Bill was making.

So I have to comment.

I have to comment.

Really?

Right, Bill, let's have it.

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 say.

And also, are you in chimp or baboon language?

Because they're different.

Oh, okay.

I was speaking, yes, a sort of conversational chimp.

Not formal.

It wasn't formal.

It was just a conversation.

Hey, how you doing?

You know.

You've got to break out your BBC chimpanzee.

Yeah.

Okay.

I was just going,

that's more like.

Right, now let's get the translation.

Jane, what do you interpret Bill was just saying?

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 it, but we allowed him to do the show anyway.

It was fun doing a couple of 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.

Don't do that.

Yeah, go away.

And what about good?

hello, good evening?

Or hello.

What's a greeting?

Well, I did the greeting.

I started the greeting, didn't I?

Oh, yeah.

Like,

people always forget that they mustn't take a breath.

It's all one breath.

Okay, I'll try again.

I mean, I can I'm sort of getting there.

You see, look, it's responding.

All the audience are responding in the gym.

You will be able to subscribe to Bill's language course that will be available in shops from October.

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, 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 sort of 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 Sonso pantheot or if it's a Wybera panthoot, as well as whether or not it happens to be Frank or James who's pantooting.

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 behaviour in common, it really strongly suggests that we at some point should have had that behaviour 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 kinds 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, six, six million years ago, something like that, that probably, if there were similarities in chimps and humans today, maybe they came 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 about the mid-80s, about 1986, where

you became increasingly aware

that this was one of the major issues in terms of both the chimpanzees you've been working with and across the world.

What do you think are the things that we are as yet

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 rainforests, 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.

And it's the trafficking of these animals to meat markets, wild 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 this 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 behaviour, 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 programme 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 programme 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.

We can't.

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 zoo.

I mean, we say that as a joke, it's a kind of a

name for it.

But we're a sort of rescue centre, 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 uh, then, what are they going to do?

And some no, sometimes they're euthanased, and we're 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 say, they're small primates, and we've got giant pigeons, tortoises.

You might hear them in a minute, kicking against the wall of the street.

They're amazingly loud tortoises.

When they really want to, they've really got some power in their legs when they want to get out.

What the hell is that?

Oh, that's the tortoise, you know, doing his Zumba.

Do you think it might be a kind of a Morse code?

So, do you think they're trying to communicate?

I don't know.

Yeah,

but Bill, the male mating draws back and then boom into the lady to get the for mating.

Yes, maybe that's what's going on.

Do you think

there's some tortoise action going on here, John?

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, 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, very pastoral and beyond.

We also asked our audience a question.

See, 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 will 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,

Matt Sullivan has C beam because things can only get wetter.

So C bream, think there we go.

This is

Christopher Parker just says almost any species, but based on mankind's performance, preferably the female of that one.

This is

the most agonizing but brilliant, I think, pun is the one from Dion Smith, who says llamas because they'll survive the alpaca lips.

Yeah, I know.

That's

a lot of work that's gone into that.

So, thank you very much to

our panel, 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, Robin, that's

perhaps more problematic, 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 think I would rather say we don't know.

Do you know?

Sometimes when I listen to physicists talking, I regret buying a watch.

Thanks very much for listening, everyone, and bye-bye.

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