Panbanisha Dies From A Common Cold: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh Has Much To Answer For

From Chimp Trainer's Daughter Nov. 7

Thanks to my extended family of facebook friends in anthropology, I was appalled to read of the death of Panbanisha, one of the two bonobos famous for learning what Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has all along called human language. The other, of course is Kanzi. Panbanisha was 27, still young for a member of her species. The 'official' word came from the deposed head of the Great Ape Trust, herself, Savage-Rumbaugh.

“Panbanisha failed to overcome the cold that all the Bonobos have been fighting. She was the most sensitive, the most creative, the most intelligent of all - she always sought the path of peace. Her Presence always filled the building. She understood all that was said and saw all that was done. Yet she could not speak as humans do - and therefore was misunderstood.

“I hope to rally the souls of the remaining bonobos so that they believe there really is a future worth living for. I hope to find a way to build a better world - a world in which those who have no voice and are unjustly persecuted - can begin to feel safe and honored, a world where the good no longer die young, a world where the Ann Franks of our time can come out of the cages and meet faces of friendliness and love.

“Panbanisha was never meant to live in a cage as she was always good and she understood responsibility and morality and had immense self control. Now she is free, free at last.” S. Savage-Rumbaugh (quoted in the WestDesMoines.Patch.com)

Without prejudice, and keeping in mind that there have as yet been no charges brought against Savage-Rumbaugh, I think it might be said that the above notice belies a human being with only a slender grasp of reality. Such at least has been the scuttlebutt for many years, even before her organization ceased doing serious research and became little more than a preserve for the animals that she had once exploited [yes, exploited] in the name of science. 
     You can only call it exploitation if the researcher in question, for example, believed that it was ethical and reasonable to separate bonobo young from their mothers and other relations so that they could be raised 'bi-culturally,' loosely analogous, I suppose, to being brought up by parents who speak two languages and derive from different cultures. But it is only loosely analogous, and more precisely could be termed playing fast and loose with ethical principles and the humane treatment of animals.
     And therein lies the crux of the whole affair. Savage-Rumbaugh and her ilk are at the heart of the segment of the learned community who have lobbied long and hard for a more enlightened [in their view] assessment of our fellow great apes. They have it that chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans are sufficiently like us bipedal apes as to be considered entitled to the same rights and privileges, legal and moral, as humans. I have always considered this stance to be wrong-headed, at best, and hopelessly misguided, at worst. I do not mean to say that the other great apes aren't worthy of our attention, our care and concern, or that they don't manifest extraordinary behavior and cognitive ability. But I have never bought into the notion that they are so like us as to be the equal of humans.
     I know that this position exposes me to accusations of speciesism [if that coined expression makes any sense at all], however there is nothing in the annals of great ape behaviour study that suggests to me any other conclusion but that humans are, uniquely, human. Here's why. Savage-Rumbaugh and others have long held that their captives are able to learn the rudiments of language. But there's an argument to be made that their subjects are simply learning a variety of new signs for things and actions that already formed their perceptual universe. Humans, on the other hand, are capable of creating the concept of a 'cognitive universe' and conveying the meaning  to other humans! The other great apes will never be so talented. You could say, of course, that many humans wouldn't be capable of conceptualizing such things, for example those with cognitive challenges or who are strictly speaking mentally ill. That misses the point. As a species, humans are capable of making meaning out of stones, and sounds, and pictograms, and anything else, and regularly assign meaning to different classes of objects on the basis of their meaning in a social hierarchy. Tell that to a chimp.
     I have a simple challenge for those who'd say that the other great apes are worthy of the label human. Once you have raised them in an early twenty-first century American middle-class cultural environment, once you have managed to teach them the difference between a hunk of beef tenderloin and a hunk of ground round, see how easy it is to teach them the difference in social status inherent in the two dietary choices. That, to me is a test of what it truly means to be human, regardless of whose cultural milieu. Humans in other cultures learn a different set of significances--such is the nature of human culture. The other great apes are incapable.
     To Sue Savage-Rumbaugh I say 'You have forever perverted the natural lives of the great apes in your trust. If you're even capable of realizing the harm you've done [and continue to do in their behalf] I hope that you'll live a long, remorse-filled, life.'
     Unfortunately, after reading her message to the world upon the death of Panbanisha, I can't be certain of that outcome.  

........

Thanks for dropping by! If you like what you see, follow me on Google Friend Connect or Twitter, friend me on Facebook, check out my publications at Academia, or connect on Linkedin. You can also subscribe to receive new posts by email or RSS [scroll to the top and look on the left]. And please don't forget. Oh, and you can always put me on your blogroll! By the way, I get a small commission for anything you purchase from Amazon.com if you go there by clicking through from this site. 

Update on 'Chimps Attack and Mortally Wound Student at Chimp Eden in South Africa'

A very sad, but salutary report today that should give pause to the chimps 'r us community. 
     From The Telegraph comes this

With all due respect for the phenomenal work on great ape behaviour that's been accomplished over the past 50 or so years, this story underscores a point that Iain Davidson once shared with me. His rhetorical question was, 'If they're so much like us why do we need to incarcerate them?'
     People love anthropomorphizing canids. But dogs kill and maim people who mean them no harm. Elephants are presumed to be the most intelligent land animal. But they can kill people out of fear, or because they get in the way. Little cats and big cats have the affection of bazillions of people. But, as someone who's been savaged by a house cat for no other reason than that I woke it up, I'm not so sure they're all that human. I could go on. I hope you take my point.
     No matter how tender the care, or how well-meaning the care-giver, or how thorough the obedience training, none of these animals can be trusted to walk among us. I'm compelled to point out that the same is true of Guinea pigs, rabbits, wolves, porcupines, and the other great apes and monkeys, and prosimians.
     My old friend pointed out that people are capable of savagery, too. But as Freud pointed out, we're all neurotic because we're taught (most of us, anyway) to suppress a violent or murderous thought. We are capable of learning a morality, because that is something that requires the assignment of meaning to abstract ideas. Humans are the only animals with this capacity. Period.
     Dog lovers complain because Pit Bulls have a bad rap. No, pit bulls have a savage history of selective breeding for the traits that all too often emerge, even in the most docile, well-trained individuals. Unlike humans, such animals act in their instinctive ways without compunction. They don't 'think' about it. Those chimps at Chimp Eden didn't think about what they were doing. They just did it.
     Even O.J. Simpson has more humanity than those chimps. And that's not a rap on the chimps; it's a rap on the people who make them out to be something they're not. 

Show your support for this blog. Remember that when you purchase from Amazon by clicking any of the links on the right, you'll be getting great discounts and supporting the Subversive Archaeologist's field activities at the same time!

Parsing Pettit's The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial

I've been struggling against my strong desire to avoid saying anything about Paul Pettitt's book, The Palaeolithic Origins of Human Burial [it is perhaps more accurately described as a treatise on the evolution of responses to death among humans and their bipedal ancestors]. I'm not avoiding it because of anything he has to say about my critique of Middle Palaeolithic burials. It's because I'm not as eloquent about some fallacious arguments as I am about others. [Believe it or don't.] By the end of this blurt, Pettitt's thesis will be shown for what it is--a sentimental piece of pseudo-science that ignores the similarities between the behaviour of chimpanzees and other mammals, and between mammals and other members of Animalia. So, on with the show.
     Remember me saying that Pettitt is careful to point out, repeatedly, that my work is 'literature-based,' as if that had any relevance whatsoever to the veracity of my arguments. Well, Pettitt's entire thesis is based on written accounts of observations--by others--of chimpanzee behaviour in the presence of death. And there have been many, whether that be death by accident, by disease, by killing, or by neglect. And I'm reluctant to say much about his thesis because in so doing I'll be denigrating his sentimental anthropomorphizing of the chimp behaviour he's read about. Yet, without any warrant whatsoever for his conclusions, he ascribes complex emotional states to our closest relatives. Moreover, he builds, on a foundation of his tenuous inferences, an edifice of insupportable extrapolations from the chimp data. 
     I'll give you an example. Pettitt recognizes that we humans are moved by observations of chimps when they encounter death. He and others of our species impute human emotions to those chimp behaviours where there may well be nothing in their actions that arises from the same meanings that we give death. Still, from his 'feeling' about these present-day observations Pettitt infers that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans must have had the same or a similar response to death as that which he ascribes to the present-day humans and chimps. And so, for example, he presumes to claim that the presence of Neanderthal skeletal remains in a cave is evidence of what he calls Funerary caching, whereby a corpse is placed 

in a chosen place, such as at the back of caves, in natural fissures, etc. Also the use of pits originally created for purposes other than burial... the place is given meaning beyond prosaic concerns such as corpse protection. Concepts such as 'places of the dead' may arise from funerary caching.

And porcines might take to the air in winged flight...
Having already prepared his reader to accept virtually any chimp behaviour with respect to a dead conspecific as  imbued with emotion and meaning [other, that is, than complete disregard] we are powerless to refute his claim that hominid skeletal remains in caves are there for a reason. This makes it mightily difficult for any archaeologist, say, like me, to rule out natural deposition, since, according to Pettitt, by virtue of its location any piece of a hominid must be seen as a purposeful act of caching. 
     And, if one swallows Pettitt's thesis, the work of Sandgathe, Dibble, Golberg and others at Roc de Marsal amounts to a hill o' beans. You'll remember that they determined that the Neanderthal child must have been naturally buried in a naturally occurring solution cavity, which is probably the only reason it was preserved. On Pettitt's account, this must have been a case of funerary caching. Full stop. No need for discussion. On to the next bit of fluff. 
     Hey! Not so fast!
     In the first place, the author is employing a fallacious form of argument known as petitio principii, or begging the question, in which a proposition is made that uses its own premises as proof of the proposition. Viz. Chimpanzees give meaning to death. Hominids must therefore give meaning to death. If we find evidence of death it must have been meaningful to another member of that hominid species. To accept any of Pettitt's constructions of palaeo-reality, you first must accept that anything has 'meaning' for a chimp. As I've said before, the day a chimp can tell me the socially meaningful [to me] difference between filet mignon and hamburger, or between a Geo Metro and a Lamborghini, that'll be the day that I accept Pettitt's premises.
     In truth, Pettitt's presentation evinces yet another example of a logical fallacy, the one known as argument from exclusion, or argument from want of evident alternatives. Here's why. Unfortunately for Pettitt, chimpanzee behaviour with regard to death is not unlike that of elephants, dogs, cats (big and small), and a host of other animals among whose adaptations is a lick of what most would call intelligence--at a minimum the ability to learn behaviours from other members of their species. How solid does Pettitt's theory of mortuary behaviour evolution look when you consider that chimps aren't the only ones to act in a certain way in the presence of death. 
     Fer gawd's sake, the only reason we're able to teach elephants or dogs (and I might add, chimps) to jump through hoops is because they are social animals, and ones instinctively capable of learning. Using Pettitt's criteria for what he calls mortuary behaviour we should regard elephant behaviour in the presence of death to stand as evidence of the elephant's experience of what you and I would recognize as a meaningful occurrence. 
     So, at the end of the day, Pettitt's book is a house of cards, built on sentimentality, and amounts to nothing short of pseudo-scientific quackery.
     Tell me I'm wrong! 

Show your support for this blog. Remember that when you purchase from Amazon by clicking any of the links on the right, you'll be getting great discounts and supporting the Subversive Archaeologist's field activities at the same time!

NewsSpotting Again! Gorilla My Dreams

Oh, I want a girl just like the girl that married Dear Ol' Dad! 
(Credit: San Diego Zoo Safari Park)

I can't resist drawing your attention to the news that now the gorilla genome has been sequenced. Elizabeth Pennisi writes in Science Now, 'A Little Gorilla in Us All.'

Word is that we're more like gorillas in some ways than we are like chimps, even if we are more like chimps and bonobos, overall, than we are like these wonderful creatures. Make of that what you will, the achievement is, still, quite awe inspiring.