Panzee and Panbanisha

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Panpanzee, often called "Panzee", and Panbanisha are two apes with whom research is being carried out in the United States. Panzee lives at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University and Panbanisha lives at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa. Panzee is a common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), while Panbanisha is a Bonobo (Pan paniscus); these are two separate (endangered) species. The basis of the early research, headed by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a US anthropologist, is to study the language faculties of non-human primates and find out to what extent their upbringing affects their ability to use language.

Panzee and Panbanisha were reared in an environment with other bonobos and with human teachers. The teachers used keyboards with lexigrams on them in tandem with spoken communication in order to allow the girls to communicate back to them, and to allow the apes to learn to comprehend spoken and symbolic language [1]. It should be noted that of the two, Panbanisha showed a greater linguistic capability, and was able to comprehend far more spoken language and lexigrams than her counterpart, Panzee.

The keyboards now in use contain a few hundred symbols, and the linguistic capability of these two is quite good. [1] They are able to recognise not only digitised and spoken speech, but also the use of solely lexigrams from the keyboard.

The researchers claim that the experiments with these apes show that the gap between the genus Pan and our early hominid ancestors, and even ourselves, is much smaller than we had previously realised.

Panbanisha now has two sons, Nyota and Nathen. Panzee does not have any children at this time.

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  1. ^ a b Savage-Rumbaugh, S., and Lewin, R. (1994) Kanzi: The Ape At The Brink of The Human Mind, John Wiley and Sons, Toronto. ISBN: 047115959X