Savage-Rumbaugh lectures at Templeton Foundation symposium in South Africa

Des Moines, Iowa – February 26, 2009 – Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a scientist with special standing at Great Ape Trust of Iowa, was among a prestigious group of scientists invited to present at a recent John Templeton Foundation symposium in Cape Town, South Africa, exploring the evolution of language, imagination and spirituality.

‘Homo Symbolicus’: The Dawn of Language, Imagination and Spirituality explored the insights recent archaeological discoveries may offer in developing theories about the origin and evolution of language, symbolic behavior and the capacity for spiritual culture among the earliest humans. Savage-Rumbaugh, who pioneered language research with Great Ape Trust resident bonobos Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota, was among 12 scholars from four continents invited to speak at the symposium.

Savage-Rumbaugh initially studied cognitive and verbal learning processes in children, then applied the investigation to common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). For the last three decades, she has focused on symbolic and cognitive processes in bonobos (Pan paniscus), first at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University and now at Great Ape Trust, where Kanzi, Panbanisha, Nyota and other members of their family moved in 2005.

Savage-Rumbaugh’s presentation responded to critics who have claimed that bonobos and chimpanzees are not capable of symbolic and grammatical processes by showing how critics systematically ignored the power of culture to produce capabilities previously understood as species-specific and genetically predetermined.

“Critics of the work made the mistake of treating all members of a species the same, regardless of rearing,” she said. “In reality, chimpanzees and bonobos, though members of different species, who are reared in the same environment are far more alike than members of the same species reared in different species.”

The data produced through the bicultural rearing environments of the bonobos at Great Ape Trust are now being recognized as central to the discovery of the origins and development of humanity’s complex planning abilities, myth, ritual, self-identity and self-determination. “The finding that apes are far more dependent upon, and capable of, symbolic constructions than previously thought has wide implications for the emergent structure of human societies,” Savage-Rumbaugh said.

Great Ape Trust Director of Bonobo Research William M. Fields said Savage-Rumbaugh’s invitation to speak at the symposium in South Africa is a significant recognition of the Great Ape Trust’s research corpus.

“We study Pan Symbolicus here,” Fields said. “Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota are all symbolic creatures, and it’s a high recognition that the scholars involved in this conference are working with us.”

The Jan. 16-19 symposium was held in Cape Town because of its proximity to an archaeological site where 75,000-year-old shell beads and engraved ochre were discovered, suggesting to scientists that the behavior of Middle Stone Age people was mediated by symbolism. The symposium was the first to give true recognition to the role that acquired symbolic behavior played in the emergence of the suite of abilities which scientists now recognize as characteristically human, and extant throughout all living human cultures. The proceedings will be published as a book.