Linguistic, Cultural and Cognitive Capacities of Bonobos(Pan Paniscus)

Abstract

When human cultures merge, each takes on characteristics of the other and a completely new culture may emerge. Can a similar kind of phenomenon occur when the ways of being, doing, thinking, speaking and acting meld between two closely related hominid species, like Pan and Homo? We point to a new kind of group process, termed a Pan/Homo culture, and characterized by changes in the behavior of each species. A common emic perspective has developed between members of different species as they have come to share a common culture, but not a common biology. Their long-term shared experiences lend the force of credibility and meaningfulness to the communications regarding goals, plans and intentions. These expressions, inherently functional and meaningful within the joint subjective experiences of the members of the culture, nonetheless fail to meet standards of basic science, which demand detachment and disembodiment of communication. Because of this failure, accurate emic accounts of experiences within the culture are categorized as 'anecdotal'. By contrast, identical emic descriptions of experiences in 'human-only' cultures carry the force of law when given under oath. Accurate emic descriptions of communication processes-using examples of spontaneous Pan/Homo dialogues-are presented to reveal this bias. These dialogues illustrate the way in which empiricism acts to protect established modes of thought from new frameworks that pose a threat to its established interpretations of extant data.They also illustrate the cultural processes of shared knowledge, shared memory and joint subjective perceptions of reality that structure true symbolic communicative interchange and render it impervious to etic understanding.

Can natural behavior be cultivated? The farm as local human/animal culture

“…In 2000, William Fields and Savage-Rumbaugh developed a novel, cultural explanation of why Kanzi acquired language. They suggested that what distinguished the work with Kanzi from the work with Nim was that Savage-Rumbaugh allowed a bi-species culture to develop between apes and humans: a Pan/Homo culture (Savage-Rumbaugh and Fields, 2000). This explanation is further developed in Segerdahl et al (2005).…”

Moving Ourselves, Moving Others: Motion and Emotion in Intersubjectivity, Consciousness, and Language

“…And on grounds of genetic and behavioural similarity, we would certainly expect for nonhuman primates to manifest intersubjectivity and consciousness. Indeed, some enculturated nonhuman primates could be argued to have mastered a rudimentary language in the sense that Wittgenstein means and have even been reared to different extents with human caregivers, and thereby afforded the opportunity to acquire some experience in this complicated form of life (see Savage-Rumbaugh & Fields 2000;. Taking his cue from the talking lions, Gill (1997: 26) argues that such chimpanzees "do speak and we do understand them because, at least to a significant extent, we share a common 'form of life, ' grounded as it is in gestural, reciprocal, and task-oriented embodiment. "…”

The Structural Effects of Modality on the Rise of Symbolic Language: A Rebuttal of Evolutionary Accounts and a Laboratory Demonstration

“…In particular, it has been established that, with training, apes can learn vast sets of visual symbols and can combine these productively (e.g., Savage-Rumbaugh et al, 1993; Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin, 1996; Lyn and Savage-Rumbaugh, 2000; Savage-Rumbaugh and Fields, 2000). Follow-up studies have documented that chimpanzees and bonobos raised in symbol-rich environments can develop a vocabulary and utterance complexity similar to those of 3 year-old children (Lieberman, 1984, chapter 10; Gardner and Gardner, 1985, 1969; Pedersen, 2012).…”