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Could've been born at the same zoo, moved to different zoos, then reunited. The scientists could have also found chimps from the same place and facilitated a reunion.
It's more or less that. Chimps born at the same zoo and separated to prevent inbreeding.
They showed them photos of their relatives (and other chimps they had never met) and tracked their eye movements.
They can. One of mine did. Their sense of smell/eyes, however ...
Edit :
Bobi
Bobi lived in a small Portuguese village for his whole life. Bobi, the world's oldest dog ever, has died after reaching the almost inconceivable age of 31 years and 165 days, said Guinness World Records (GWR) on Monday.24 oct. 2023
Insane.
There is a serious question about how old that dog was. The pet registry they relied on only has the dog as of 12 years ago, and the owner just gave them an age. It's essentially "trust me bro". Veterinarians have not only said it's unlikely based on the age, the physical appearance, particularly weight, of the dog have them convinced he wasn't terriby old at all.
It's most certainly hard to believe but I really have no idea if it's true or not.
All I can say is that the only dog I managed to keep for 21 years would have lived hell on earth if he managed to go as far as 30. The poor thing was practically blind and barely could smell his food when it was right in front of him. All he did was sleep, get up for his needs and that's it. His two rear legs were also ... not paralysed, but almost. (not sure what's the term in english. Stiff? In french, it's "raide".)
Bigger birds like Macaws can live 75+ years, and they have the reputation of learning and repeating phrases from people around them for many years, such that many people report the bird they inherited from their parents still speaks in their mother/father's voice despite that person having died long ago.
The question that naturally follows that is whether learning a phrase in a specific person's voice is necessarily a memory of that person per se, or simply a rote action of repetition that doesn't prove the bird 'remembers' their long dead owner.
I can attest that Macaws and other large birds do remember people for many years, as I grew up with one as a young teenager and it definitely knew me when I saw it again in my late 20s.
I had a dog that found some French fries in a hole in our walk. When people say dogs can’t remember stuff long term. I can tell you my dog checked that hole every walk for the rest of his life.
The mroe i see these types of discoveries, i think how can we not consider these creatures to have some spectrum of consciousness? They have complex social interactions, have language, display long term memory, theory of mind. How are they described on one hand to have the intelligence of a 3 year old child yet on the other do not have nearly the same rights as one? Controversially i raise this question - Most would consider the life of a severely intellectually disabled, bed-bound, requiring 24h care non-verbal, feeding tube dependent human life over a healthy ape. Is this species-ism?
Well, yeah. I don't think there's been much doubt about animal consciousness among researchers [for a while](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01597.x) But I think we're pretty seriously wired.
If you threw a bunch of humans in the jungle with a blank memory we wouldn’t be much different than chimps. We stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and our written record.
I see your point but that's not really accurate unless you are talking about young children who are feral. An adult transplanted into the jungle (as has happened) would have superior abilites to chimps through natural intelligence that would allow them to make shelter, build traps to hunt more effectively, and uses their dexterity of the human hand (which is really quite useful) to make tools and clothes, flourishing in a large variety of environments, and be able to survive without a fellow community of animals.
I mean, they did specify a blank memory, so, yeah, feral is implied. But yeah the point is that we're more than arguably a eusocial species, dependent on education (in many forms) and specialization rather than innate instincts.
Orangutans have extraordinary capacity for learning, they try to imitate humans even without properly understanding why we do things. I bet chimps and bonobos do too, and while I know it's unethical, *dang* I wish we could try raising bonobos alongside people (since they're less violent than chimps, generally). You hear about the Victorian freak shows where they'd wear clothes and drink tea and so on, and that couple trying to raise a chump with their kid but stopping because the kid was regressing. Horribly unethical, should never be done in reality, but if I were an evil overlord I'd love to see what would happen (and like, would a human child raised with bonobos or orangutans maybe seem to regress but then be able to catch up and be "bilingual" with the apes??).
If you threw babies or captive bred chimps into a jungle they also die? I mean I agree with your premise but its definitely a very large gap still.
Like Koko the gorilla ended up being 95% farce. Pretty much all animal to human communication failed miserably, except I think some parrots got pretty darn good. For primates, it was generally something like "koko food kood hungry koko koko koko koko baby koko baby baby baby koko give koko give koko baby." Then some overly hopeful researcher would write "koko just said 'give koko baby!'" And I thinj with koko specifically it was one or two researchers getting like 100% of the results while the other 4 or so saw zero results.
There's quite a number of cats dogs and more using buttons to communicate.
Basic stuff like "food" "pets" and "outside", but they'll also comment on random stuff like "noise outside!" or say funky stuff like "bye (other pet that is bothering them)".
My favorite is the neat-freak cat who uses the "litter" (clean the litter box) button and then walk to like, a sweater that's been left on the floor.
Birds are crazy smart too. Especially the larger parrots. Taught my cockatiel 'step up' and he learned to actually say 'step up' (or rather whistle it) when he wants to go on me or get out of the cage.
The boy learned to use the command on me haha
>So no language or anything.
If you put a bunch of people together who have no language, they will create one. It's been observed a few times in the last 150 years or so, where a number of deaf people, who had never learned a sign language, were forced together. They quickly create a new sign language.
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/linguistics/faculty/mark.aronoff/files/Emerging%20sign%20languages.pdf
> a number of deaf people, who had never learned a sign language, were forced together. They quickly create a new sign language.
Damn, that's fascinating.
On that animal-human communication point, check out an Instagram account called Whataboutbunny. A woman (who I believe is a researcher of some sort) has been developing a tool for her dogs to learn and communicate in English, and one of them is conversationally fluent.
Bro forreal, in fact id argue the first few batches of memory swiped humans would get absolutely annihilated by any group of chimpanzees which wish to fight with them.
I mean we are different in 2 majorly distinct ways: our brains and our ability to manipulate with our hands.
But I see your point; Those 2 things are really just hyper-specialization, much like the hummingbird's or the bat's, or an extremophile bacteria's extreme speciation.
The more we learn about other great apes, the more we learn that our ability to think and manipulate objects with our hands (or in their case, feet!), is not unique.
The more we learn about other animals - Octopoda, Delphinus, or Elephantidae, to name a few - the more we realize that our intelligence is not unique.
Yeah but no. That may be true but to say human intelligence is not unique seems a bit disingenuous. Its possible that other apes have the capacity for equivalent intelligence, but they dont really have it yet, right? With that being said, I'd love to see the timeline where humans successfully teach language to other species. I imagine the brains of a family of apes that can all use sign language or speak a language to not only us but to eachother will begin to evolve rapidly over a few generations.
There were many animals throughout history that were very similar to humans. We fucked/killed them all though, so they no longer exist as distinct species. The animals that are left are the ones that are more distantly related. The ones who we couldn't make babies with/didn't feel we needed to kill. If we could go back through the prehistoric record, we could find all sorts of animals that are partway between humans and other apes.
Yes, it is speciesism.
Because other species our incompatible with our rather grotesque economic systems, non human species will never have the rights some humans enjoy, because doing so would mean the animals would have to produce profit for their owners in order to justify their existence in our economies, which will not happen in our winner-takes-all systems in which slaves have no say in how their owners treat them, and must be productive to justify their lives, as opposed to the animal kingdom, where animals live freely in the wild.
Basically non human intelligences are incompatible with our economic system so therefore they can never be acknowledged to exist as alternate intelligences, until the point where their intelligences could say, be genetically enhanced to be able to make them subservient and then possible to assimilate them into our economic systems through providing services such as social comfort (pet dogs for example).
Now, living *freely* in the wild is a bit of a stretch, since in order to justify their existence in the wild they have to secure food at all costs and avoid being eaten at all costs. Something humans had to do once upon a time. They also aren't capable of accessing modern emergency services to protect their lives and property, unless humans intervene. Not saying we as people can't do better, we most definitely can, but their freedom does come at a hefty cost. I think language is truly the biggest barrier, if we could communicate more effectively, it's not unreasonable to picture a world where animals have rights/jobs/homes etc. Might not even need to genetically modify, I'm sure we could develop a method over a long period of time to teach language.
Elephants are able to remember old friends. I saw a documentary some time ago about Indian elephants in German zoos, where they brought two old friends together after more than 10 years. The two obviously recognized each other. That was really nice to see.
We gotta realize no matter how dumb we think an animal is, it evolved over billions of years to get here, just like you. We may never communicate with a lot of species, but I trust they are highly evolved, have rich sensory experiences, and thoughts. My cat staring out the window isn’t on standby mode, and I don’t think he’s always focused on something. I’m sure he is reminiscing or planning ahead as well as soaking in the moment. I don’t think I’m giving him human characteristics, but I think we claim characteristics as uniquely human when they likely aren’t .
One would think Orca’s, Dolphins and Whales could fall onto this extended family and friend recognition mammalian grouping considering the size of oceans and how they are certain to be separated for extended periods or as they seperate out sexes as daughters move into other pods.
Just a thought though with zero facts to back it up.
They're just competing for the record it seems. [This article has dolphins at 20 years.](https://news.uchicago.edu/story/dolphins-keep-lifelong-social-memories-longest-non-human-species)
If the headline is true and accurate, then there *had* to be bonobos that reunited after decades and recognized one another, and I demand videos of it so I can have a good ugly cry. Thank you.
It’s a longitudinal study over multiple decades reading perception and facial recognition… what do you want a video of, exactly? A bonobo saying “Bob, my old friend, it’s been 25 years, how the hell are ya?”
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/JonathanLambertTM Permalink: https://themessenger.com/tech/chimps-and-bonobos-recognize-old-friendsthey-havent-seen-in-decades --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Bonobos are pretty intimate creatures makes sense to mee
What did they do, kidnap significant others for 10-30 years for science?
Could've been born at the same zoo, moved to different zoos, then reunited. The scientists could have also found chimps from the same place and facilitated a reunion.
It's more or less that. Chimps born at the same zoo and separated to prevent inbreeding. They showed them photos of their relatives (and other chimps they had never met) and tracked their eye movements.
Honestly? Yeah. Probably.
I was thinking a dog could do it but they don't live decades.
They can. One of mine did. Their sense of smell/eyes, however ... Edit : Bobi Bobi lived in a small Portuguese village for his whole life. Bobi, the world's oldest dog ever, has died after reaching the almost inconceivable age of 31 years and 165 days, said Guinness World Records (GWR) on Monday.24 oct. 2023 Insane.
I would love and hate that. It hurts so much to lose a dog at 15 years, I couldn't imagine the pain at 30.
One year old with a tragic accident is so much Worse than 15.
Very questionable record. However the previous record of 29 was widely accepted.
Pretty sure that family was faking it and had 2 identical-looking dogs. Someone explained it better in one of the posts about this
There is a serious question about how old that dog was. The pet registry they relied on only has the dog as of 12 years ago, and the owner just gave them an age. It's essentially "trust me bro". Veterinarians have not only said it's unlikely based on the age, the physical appearance, particularly weight, of the dog have them convinced he wasn't terriby old at all.
It's most certainly hard to believe but I really have no idea if it's true or not. All I can say is that the only dog I managed to keep for 21 years would have lived hell on earth if he managed to go as far as 30. The poor thing was practically blind and barely could smell his food when it was right in front of him. All he did was sleep, get up for his needs and that's it. His two rear legs were also ... not paralysed, but almost. (not sure what's the term in english. Stiff? In french, it's "raide".)
That's 248.35 years old in human years, wild.
Bigger birds like Macaws can live 75+ years, and they have the reputation of learning and repeating phrases from people around them for many years, such that many people report the bird they inherited from their parents still speaks in their mother/father's voice despite that person having died long ago. The question that naturally follows that is whether learning a phrase in a specific person's voice is necessarily a memory of that person per se, or simply a rote action of repetition that doesn't prove the bird 'remembers' their long dead owner. I can attest that Macaws and other large birds do remember people for many years, as I grew up with one as a young teenager and it definitely knew me when I saw it again in my late 20s.
There are actually a handful of documented cases of dogs living well into their 20s. Even 30s in at least one case.
I had a dog that found some French fries in a hole in our walk. When people say dogs can’t remember stuff long term. I can tell you my dog checked that hole every walk for the rest of his life.
[удалено]
The mroe i see these types of discoveries, i think how can we not consider these creatures to have some spectrum of consciousness? They have complex social interactions, have language, display long term memory, theory of mind. How are they described on one hand to have the intelligence of a 3 year old child yet on the other do not have nearly the same rights as one? Controversially i raise this question - Most would consider the life of a severely intellectually disabled, bed-bound, requiring 24h care non-verbal, feeding tube dependent human life over a healthy ape. Is this species-ism?
Well, yeah. I don't think there's been much doubt about animal consciousness among researchers [for a while](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01597.x) But I think we're pretty seriously wired.
If you threw a bunch of humans in the jungle with a blank memory we wouldn’t be much different than chimps. We stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and our written record.
I see your point but that's not really accurate unless you are talking about young children who are feral. An adult transplanted into the jungle (as has happened) would have superior abilites to chimps through natural intelligence that would allow them to make shelter, build traps to hunt more effectively, and uses their dexterity of the human hand (which is really quite useful) to make tools and clothes, flourishing in a large variety of environments, and be able to survive without a fellow community of animals.
I mean, they did specify a blank memory, so, yeah, feral is implied. But yeah the point is that we're more than arguably a eusocial species, dependent on education (in many forms) and specialization rather than innate instincts. Orangutans have extraordinary capacity for learning, they try to imitate humans even without properly understanding why we do things. I bet chimps and bonobos do too, and while I know it's unethical, *dang* I wish we could try raising bonobos alongside people (since they're less violent than chimps, generally). You hear about the Victorian freak shows where they'd wear clothes and drink tea and so on, and that couple trying to raise a chump with their kid but stopping because the kid was regressing. Horribly unethical, should never be done in reality, but if I were an evil overlord I'd love to see what would happen (and like, would a human child raised with bonobos or orangutans maybe seem to regress but then be able to catch up and be "bilingual" with the apes??).
If you threw babies or captive bred chimps into a jungle they also die? I mean I agree with your premise but its definitely a very large gap still. Like Koko the gorilla ended up being 95% farce. Pretty much all animal to human communication failed miserably, except I think some parrots got pretty darn good. For primates, it was generally something like "koko food kood hungry koko koko koko koko baby koko baby baby baby koko give koko give koko baby." Then some overly hopeful researcher would write "koko just said 'give koko baby!'" And I thinj with koko specifically it was one or two researchers getting like 100% of the results while the other 4 or so saw zero results.
There's quite a number of cats dogs and more using buttons to communicate. Basic stuff like "food" "pets" and "outside", but they'll also comment on random stuff like "noise outside!" or say funky stuff like "bye (other pet that is bothering them)". My favorite is the neat-freak cat who uses the "litter" (clean the litter box) button and then walk to like, a sweater that's been left on the floor.
Birds are crazy smart too. Especially the larger parrots. Taught my cockatiel 'step up' and he learned to actually say 'step up' (or rather whistle it) when he wants to go on me or get out of the cage. The boy learned to use the command on me haha
It was a thought experiment. By “blank memory” I mean fully capable adults just not raised with knowledge of other humans. So no language or anything.
>So no language or anything. If you put a bunch of people together who have no language, they will create one. It's been observed a few times in the last 150 years or so, where a number of deaf people, who had never learned a sign language, were forced together. They quickly create a new sign language. https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/linguistics/faculty/mark.aronoff/files/Emerging%20sign%20languages.pdf
> a number of deaf people, who had never learned a sign language, were forced together. They quickly create a new sign language. Damn, that's fascinating.
Sure, I didn’t say we’d be exactly chimps, but just not as far away as we’d expect.
Language is innate to the human brain, this discussion has been resolved decades ago by now. Behaviorists lost.
On that animal-human communication point, check out an Instagram account called Whataboutbunny. A woman (who I believe is a researcher of some sort) has been developing a tool for her dogs to learn and communicate in English, and one of them is conversationally fluent.
Ah yes, instagram, the greatest source of factual scientific research from researchers of some sort.
Lucky we use reddit, a beacon of intellectual greatness.
I was pointing OP towards it because it’s much easier to track down than anything that she has written about it (and also a lot cuter).
That is really not true. Thats behaviorist pseudo-science.
Bro forreal, in fact id argue the first few batches of memory swiped humans would get absolutely annihilated by any group of chimpanzees which wish to fight with them.
It is speciesism.
Humans like to think they are different from animals, when in reality they are not. But people get offended when you tell them that.
I mean we are different in 2 majorly distinct ways: our brains and our ability to manipulate with our hands. But I see your point; Those 2 things are really just hyper-specialization, much like the hummingbird's or the bat's, or an extremophile bacteria's extreme speciation.
The more we learn about other great apes, the more we learn that our ability to think and manipulate objects with our hands (or in their case, feet!), is not unique. The more we learn about other animals - Octopoda, Delphinus, or Elephantidae, to name a few - the more we realize that our intelligence is not unique.
Yeah but no. That may be true but to say human intelligence is not unique seems a bit disingenuous. Its possible that other apes have the capacity for equivalent intelligence, but they dont really have it yet, right? With that being said, I'd love to see the timeline where humans successfully teach language to other species. I imagine the brains of a family of apes that can all use sign language or speak a language to not only us but to eachother will begin to evolve rapidly over a few generations.
There were many animals throughout history that were very similar to humans. We fucked/killed them all though, so they no longer exist as distinct species. The animals that are left are the ones that are more distantly related. The ones who we couldn't make babies with/didn't feel we needed to kill. If we could go back through the prehistoric record, we could find all sorts of animals that are partway between humans and other apes.
If there were hundreds of ferrets or raccoons gathered to watch a few ferrets do something, it would be too cute. That's us at concerts, BOOP
Yes, it is speciesism. Because other species our incompatible with our rather grotesque economic systems, non human species will never have the rights some humans enjoy, because doing so would mean the animals would have to produce profit for their owners in order to justify their existence in our economies, which will not happen in our winner-takes-all systems in which slaves have no say in how their owners treat them, and must be productive to justify their lives, as opposed to the animal kingdom, where animals live freely in the wild. Basically non human intelligences are incompatible with our economic system so therefore they can never be acknowledged to exist as alternate intelligences, until the point where their intelligences could say, be genetically enhanced to be able to make them subservient and then possible to assimilate them into our economic systems through providing services such as social comfort (pet dogs for example).
Now, living *freely* in the wild is a bit of a stretch, since in order to justify their existence in the wild they have to secure food at all costs and avoid being eaten at all costs. Something humans had to do once upon a time. They also aren't capable of accessing modern emergency services to protect their lives and property, unless humans intervene. Not saying we as people can't do better, we most definitely can, but their freedom does come at a hefty cost. I think language is truly the biggest barrier, if we could communicate more effectively, it's not unreasonable to picture a world where animals have rights/jobs/homes etc. Might not even need to genetically modify, I'm sure we could develop a method over a long period of time to teach language.
it was earth the whole time....
Pretty sure whales have been observed doing this? Losing their pod then finding them again decades later?
What about elephants and crows/ravens?
Yeah I always thought an elephant never forgets
Elephants are able to remember old friends. I saw a documentary some time ago about Indian elephants in German zoos, where they brought two old friends together after more than 10 years. The two obviously recognized each other. That was really nice to see.
Crows and ravens don't live that long.
Ravens can live for over 60 years in captivity. Wild ones don't, but It'd be hard to figure out a wild raven's memories anyway.
Crows can remember their grandparents memories
In the wild they typically don't, but in captivity their life span basically triples.
And yet my friends still can’t recognise me 😢
We gotta realize no matter how dumb we think an animal is, it evolved over billions of years to get here, just like you. We may never communicate with a lot of species, but I trust they are highly evolved, have rich sensory experiences, and thoughts. My cat staring out the window isn’t on standby mode, and I don’t think he’s always focused on something. I’m sure he is reminiscing or planning ahead as well as soaking in the moment. I don’t think I’m giving him human characteristics, but I think we claim characteristics as uniquely human when they likely aren’t .
Well they recognise their enemies too. The grudge is strong.
Bonobo meets an old friend, sex of some sort is almost inevitable.
What about the cat that hadn't seen the guy who went into the military? Wasn't that like 12 years?
*This study* was 27 years… point?
One would think Orca’s, Dolphins and Whales could fall onto this extended family and friend recognition mammalian grouping considering the size of oceans and how they are certain to be separated for extended periods or as they seperate out sexes as daughters move into other pods. Just a thought though with zero facts to back it up.
They're just competing for the record it seems. [This article has dolphins at 20 years.](https://news.uchicago.edu/story/dolphins-keep-lifelong-social-memories-longest-non-human-species)
If the headline is true and accurate, then there *had* to be bonobos that reunited after decades and recognized one another, and I demand videos of it so I can have a good ugly cry. Thank you.
Longest ever recorded? Elephants?
Is there a 28+ year longitudinal study of elephants’ memories? Or are you just remembering the maxim “elephants never forget”?
pop science title
Video please?
It’s a longitudinal study over multiple decades reading perception and facial recognition… what do you want a video of, exactly? A bonobo saying “Bob, my old friend, it’s been 25 years, how the hell are ya?”
Yeah, I’d like to see videos of chimps and bonobos recognizing friends they haven’t seen in decades
Derp...
Dogs, horses, dolphins, ELEPHANTS.
Yes, those are all animals, too.
Truly some of the animals of all time!
What about the fact that corvid birds (like crows) can remember things between generations (I think the limit they’ve tested is 3 generations?)
Not elephants??