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Imagination isn’t just for humans, this famous ape shows
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2026 4 months ago
To primatologists around the world, Kanzi was a star. After years of training with sign language and a specialized keyboard, the 44-year-old bonobo had gained an unusually sophisticated understanding of human words, making him the focus of decades of research into nonhuman primates’ language abilities. But Christopher Krupenye, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University, wanted to test something different: Kanzi’s imagination.
In March 2025, Krupenye and his colleagues acted out a version of a child’s tea party with the bonobo, pantomiming pouring liquid from an empty pitcher into two empty glasses. A human experimenter picked up one of the glasses, pretended to pour the nonexistent liquid back into the pitcher, and set the “empty” glass down. Then, they encouraged Kanzi to point to the glass that still contained liquid.
More than two-thirds of the time, Kanzi pointed to the glass filled with make-believe juice: the first experimental evidence that primates other than humans can conceive of imaginary objects. “This is one of the most sort of remarkable discoveries I’ve ever made,” Krupenye says.
The discovery, reported by Krupenye and colleagues in Science, not only shows that imagination is not uniquely human, but also suggests imagination may have arisen millions of years ago, deeper in primates’ evolutionary past.
Learn more: https://scim.ag/4vE11QX
FOOTAGE CREDIT: BASTOS AND KRUPENYE/SCIENCE
#Bonobo #Science #ScienceShorts
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