Kanzi, one of the most famous monkeys in the world, died a few days ago at the age of 44 in his home at the Research Center of the Ape Conservation and Cognition Initiative of Des Moines, in Iowa. Kanzi was famous all over the world, especially among those who deal with animal behavior, because He had learned to “speak” using known symbols like lexigrams: for this reason it was considered the first anthropomorphic monkey to demonstrate understand English (at least that mentioned).
What does it mean that Kanzi “spoke”? Kanzi was a Bonobo born in 1980, at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University: a life spent in captivity, due to the fact that it was the son of Matata, one of the first great monkeys to which a group of researchers tried to teach to “speak”. But where Matata had proved unable to learn (or maybe he didn’t care about …), his son Kanzi showed immediately A strong and spontaneous attraction for communication.
Communication that took place through lexigrams, that is a series of symbols to each of which corresponds not to a word but an entire concept. Matata had a “Lessigrami table” available, who one day his son grabbed and began to handle. Within a few hours Kanzi had learned to communicate simple concepts, and in his life he came to develop A vocabulary of about 3,000 words.
Goodbye Kanzi. Not only that: Kanzi did not just use the individual lexigrams and their basic meaning, but He had learned to combine them to create complex concepts; An example told by the ECC website is that time he made a joke to one of the researchers and described it via lexigrams as a “bad surprise”.
Kanzi’s abilities, and his undeniable curiosity, had transformed him over the years into a real star, who ended even on YouTube to play a Minecraft. It is not yet known why he died: he was under treatment for various cardiac pathologies (44 years old is a very advanced age for a Bonobo), and very simply one day he lying down and has never raised himself. As they say in these cases, we will miss a lot.
