Readers sound off on Stonewall’s flag, Hochul’s reign and ape intelligence - New York Daily News

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist who has spent the better part of my life sitting with apes and monkeys, watching them think and feel and surprise me, and then coming back here to tell you about it. This show is about true stories from the primate world, stories that I think have the power to change how you see yourself and everyone around you. Today we have a genuinely wonderful lineup: a mystery monkey with orange lips that puzzled scientists for nearly two decades finally gets its name, orangutans in Borneo do something that stopped researchers in their tracks — and took two years to film — and we'll also dig into what it means to nurse a child for six and a half years, and why that timeline might feel a little more familiar than you'd expect. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their real-world workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts working across the spectrum from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio across the silicon industry. We are so glad they help keep this show going. Alright — let's get into it, because the forest has been busy. June: So let's start with cognition, because I want to tell you about a moment in the rainforests of Borneo that took two years to capture on film — and when you hear it, I think you'll understand why researchers were so determined to get it. A team of scientists working in the forests of Borneo built what's called a canopy bridge. Now, a canopy bridge is essentially a rope or cable structure strung between trees high up in the forest ceiling. Conservationists build them to help wildlife cross gaps — areas where logging or roads have broken the continuous tree cover that animals like orangutans depend on. And here's the thing about orangutans: they are, by inclination and by body weight, not big fans of coming to the ground. An adult male orangutan can weigh over two hundred pounds, and the ground is where the predators are, historically speaking. So orangutans have evolved to stay up high, moving through the canopy by swinging, climbing, and carefully testing branches before they put their weight on them. That testing behavior — that deliberate, thoughtful assessment of "will this hold me?" — is one of the things I find most fascinating about them. It's not instinct in the simple sense. It's judgment. June: So the researchers set up their cameras and they waited. And they waited. For two years, the bridge was there, and the orangutans in the area were... not using it, at least not in view of the cameras. Two years. I want you to sit with that for a second — that's the kind of patience conservation science demands, and it's remarkable. And then, finally, they got it. First-ever footage of an orangutan crossing a canopy bridge. And what strikes me about this story isn't just the footage itself — it's what it implies about the orangutan's mind. These animals had to notice the bridge. They had to assess it as a potential route. They had to weigh the risk of using something unfamiliar against the benefit of crossing that gap. And then one of them decided to go. That is problem-solving. That is flexible thinking. Orangutans are known for this — in captivity and in the wild, they've been documented using tools, improvising solutions to novel problems, and even deceiving researchers in ways that suggest they're modeling what the human knows and doesn't know. They are deeply, quietly intelligent. And this footage, to me, is a small but beautiful proof of that. June: Orangutan intelligence is also deeply social and cultural — and I mean that in the real scientific sense of the word "cultural." Research by primatologist Carel van Schaik and his colleagues has shown that different orangutan populations have distinct learned behaviors — ways of doing things that are passed on through observation rather than genetics. One group might use a particular technique to extract seeds; another group nearby won't, even in the same environment. That's culture. The capacity to learn from watching, to transmit knowledge across generations, is something we tend to think of as distinctly human. But orangutans have it too. And they do it largely in a quiet, solitary kind of way — they're not as gregarious as chimps or bonobos — which makes it all the more interesting, because it tells us that social learning doesn't require a big, noisy crowd. Sometimes one individual watching another is enough. June: Now let's talk biology — our shared recipe — because this is where I love to go deep, and today's story about orangutan nursing gives us a perfect doorway in. Here's the headline: there is an animal in the tropical forests of Borneo that breastfeeds its young for six and a half years. Six and a half years. The average globally for humans is somewhere around two to three years when you look across cultures, with the World Health Organization recommending at least two years. So six and a half feels extraordinary — until you understand why, and then it starts to make a different kind of sense. June: Orangutans have the longest inter-birth interval of any mammal on Earth — meaning the time between one baby and the next. A mother orangutan typically won't have another infant for seven to nine years. That is an enormous investment in a single offspring. And nursing is a huge part of that. Researchers have been able to confirm the six-and-a-half-year nursing duration through a clever technique — they analyze the chemical signatures in orangutan teeth, specifically looking at barium, an element that gets incorporated differently depending on whether an animal is nursing or eating solid food. The barium record is essentially a timeline laid down in the tooth, and it tells the story of that animal's early life. This isn't guesswork — it's chemistry. June: Now, why does this matter for our shared recipe conversation? Because the biological systems underlying this are not alien to us at all. Mammalian nursing — lactation — is one of the defining features of our entire class of animals. We are mammals. Every single primate on Earth nurses its young. The hormones involved, prolactin, oxytocin, the developmental signals, the bonding that happens — these are ancient, shared systems. When a mother orangutan nurses her infant, her brain is doing something chemically and neurologically that is recognizably similar to what happens in a human mother. Oxytocin — sometimes called the bonding hormone — floods both mother and infant during nursing in mammals broadly, including us. The D N A that codes for these systems, these hormonal pathways, this capacity for maternal attachment — we share the vast majority of it with orangutans. Humans and orangutans share roughly ninety-seven percent of their D N A. Ninety-seven percent. The instructions that build an orangutan mother's capacity to love and protect and nurse her baby for six and a half years — those instructions are almost entirely the same ones that build ours. June: And there's something else in that long nursing window worth naming: it isn't just nutrition. Researchers believe the extended nursing period in orangutans is also deeply connected to learning. That period of dependence, of closeness with the mother, is when young orangutans are absorbing everything — how to navigate the canopy, which foods are safe, how to build a sleeping nest. Every single night, an adult orangutan builds a new nest from branches and leaves, high in the trees. Young ones learn this by watching their mothers, during those long years of close contact. So the nursing isn't just feeding a body. It's feeding a mind. Sound familiar? June: Alright, let's close with a story that really got me — because it's about a discovery that took patience, dedication, and nearly two decades of scientific puzzling, and it ends with something wonderful: a new species getting its name. In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, deep in some of the most biodiverse and least-studied forest on Earth, researchers had been encountering a monkey they couldn't quite place. It had distinctive orange lips — genuinely striking, vivid orange — and a roaring call that didn't match anything in the known record. For nearly twenty years, scientists suspected this might be something new, something distinct, but the work of confirming a new primate species is meticulous. You need genetic data, morphological measurements, behavioral observation, geographic range analysis. You don't just announce a new monkey on a hunch. June: This monkey belongs to the genus Cercocebus — the mangabeys — a group of forest monkeys found across Central and West Africa. They're mid-sized, highly social, and tend to live in dense forest, which is part of why this one stayed hidden from formal science for so long. The D R C's forests are vast and in many areas extraordinarily difficult to access — and they are among the most important remaining refuges for primate diversity on the planet. The fact that a new species was hiding there, known to local communities but unrecognized by formal taxonomy, is a reminder of how much we still don't know — and how important it is to keep looking, to keep listening, to take seriously the knowledge of people who live alongside these animals. June: The confirmation of a new primate species is genuinely rare. There are roughly five hundred known species and subspecies of primates in the world, and adding to that list requires real scientific rigor. But researchers finally did it — and this orange-lipped, roaring forest monkey now has a formal identity. It has a name. And I find that moment — that moment when a living creature goes from "puzzling anomaly" to "recognized member of the family" — deeply moving. Because that's what naming does. It says: we see you. You're real. You matter. You belong. June: And in a way, that's what this whole show is about. Every week, I come here to tell you about primates who are doing things that surprise us, that move us, that make us reconsider what we thought was uniquely ours. Intelligence. Culture. Grief. Play. Long childhoods. Devoted mothers. Problem-solving. The capacity to be seen and to see. These are not human inventions. They are primate inheritances. They belong to a whole family of beings — and we are part of that family. We always have been. The same evolutionary recipe that built us built them, the same ancient D N A, shaped by the same deep time. We are not observers of the primate world. We are in it. June: Kindred Minds is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three organizations doing genuinely interesting work, and I'm grateful they help make this show possible. If today's stories moved you or made you curious, please subscribe, leave a review, and share the episode with someone you think would love it. The more people who feel connected to the living world, the better off we all are — primates included. You'll find links to all the stories we talked about today at the link in show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you next time on Kindred Minds.