Orange-lipped monkey that roars and snorts deep in Congo rainforest is new species to science - Animal Survival International

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds. I'm June — a primatologist and storyteller who is genuinely, embarrassingly obsessed with our primate relatives. Every episode I bring you true stories about the other great minds sharing this planet with us — stories that are funny and moving and scientifically grounded, and that keep reminding me, every single time, just how much we have in common with them. Today we've got some genuinely thrilling news — a roaring, snorting monkey nobody had ever formally described before, a fossil discovery that could reshape the entire ape family tree, a baby orangutan born against the odds, and some fascinating new science about the part of the brain that makes you — and your primate cousins — capable of holding a plan inside your head. A huge thank you to our sponsors making this show possible: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. We are so grateful for their support. Alright — let's go into the forest. June: So let's start with cognition, because there is a piece of science that just landed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — PNAS — and I have been thinking about it ever since I read it. It's about a region of the brain called the frontopolar cortex. Now, stay with me here, because this is not dry neuroscience — this is the story of what makes a mind capable of holding onto a future, of juggling plans, of thinking about thinking. The frontopolar cortex sits right at the very front of the frontal lobe — literally the most forward-facing part of your brain. And in humans, it's been associated with some of our most sophisticated cognitive abilities: multitasking in a deep sense, like holding one goal in mind while you pursue a different one, prospective memory — remembering to do something in the future — and what researchers sometimes call branching, which is this remarkable ability to pause what you're doing, go do something else, and then come back. It's the mental equivalent of putting a bookmark in and walking away. June: What this new research establishes is that this region isn't just important in humans — it is essential in non-human primates too. And I want to sit with that word: essential. Not present, not vestigial, not a pale echo of something we developed. Essential. The frontopolar cortex in our primate relatives is doing real cognitive work. And that matters enormously, because it pushes back against this very comfortable but deeply misleading idea that complex forward-planning thought is something that happened to us — like a switch got flipped — and that the other animals around us are running on much simpler software. They're not. The same architecture, the same neural real estate devoted to future-thinking, exists in the primate brain broadly. We are not alone in having a mind that reaches ahead in time. June: Think about what that means in practice. Primates in the wild have been documented doing things that require exactly this kind of cognition. Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and carrying spears to hunting sites they haven't arrived at yet — planning for a future need before the need exists. Orangutans have been documented communicating about events that happened in the past, using referential gestures about something that is no longer present. These aren't flukes or curiosities. They are expressions of a brain that, like ours, is doing something profound: living partly in a time that isn't now. The PNAS study gives us a neurological anchor for all of that behavioral evidence. The hardware and the behavior are telling the same story. June: And here's what I find most moving about this finding. We sometimes talk about animal cognition as if we're being generous — as if we're granting something. "Oh, they're smarter than we thought." But what this kind of research reveals is that we've been measuring from the wrong starting point. The question isn't how close these animals come to some human standard of intelligence. The question is: what does intelligence look like when you share a brain architecture that evolved across tens of millions of years of primate history? And the answer is: it looks like planning. It looks like memory. It looks like holding the future inside your skull. And it looks like something we share. June: Okay, let's talk about the shared recipe — the biology that binds us together at the most fundamental level. Because this week there are two extraordinary discovery stories in the news that I think are really windows into this question. The first one comes out of the Congo Basin rainforest, one of the most biodiverse and least-explored places on the planet. Scientists have formally described a new species of monkey — and this one has orange lips, and it roars and snorts in the deep forest. I want to let that land for a second. In 2025, there are still primate species out there that science has not yet formally named. This isn't ancient history or a fossil record find — this is a living animal, loud and vivid and orange-lipped, going about its life in the Congo rainforest while the rest of us had no idea it existed as a distinct species. June: Now, the fact that we're still finding new primate species — and we have been, with some regularity, over the past few decades — tells us something important about how much biological diversity the primate order contains. There are over 500 recognized species and subspecies of primates in the world today. They range from the tiny mouse lemur, which you could hold in one hand, to the eastern lowland gorilla, which can weigh over 200 kilograms. And across all of them — all of that extraordinary diversity — runs the same fundamental biological thread. Primates share a common ancestor. We share a body plan: forward-facing eyes for depth perception, grasping hands with nails instead of claws, relatively large brains compared to body size, and a developmental life history that involves long childhoods, strong mother-offspring bonds, and complex social learning. June: And when you get to the genetic level, the shared recipe becomes almost startling in its detail. We share approximately 98.7 percent of our D N A with chimpanzees. About 97 percent with gorillas. Even with more distant primate relatives — macaques, for example — we share something in the range of 93 percent of our D N A. Think about what that means. The genetic instructions for building a nervous system, a social brain, an immune system, a heart — most of those instructions are identical across the primate family. The differences between us and a chimpanzee, at the level of the genome, are smaller than the differences between a dog and a fox. We are genuinely, deeply, molecularly related. June: And then there's the second discovery story this week — and this one sent a little shiver down my spine. National Geographic reported on a newly discovered primate species that researchers say could redraw the ape family tree. Now I want to be careful here because the details of this finding are still being analyzed and peer-reviewed, and the scientific community will work through the implications over time. But the core idea — that we might need to revise our understanding of when and how the great ape lineage branched and diversified — is genuinely exciting. Because every time we find a new branch, a new twig on this evolutionary tree, we're not just adding a name to a list. We're adding a chapter to the story of how our kind of mind came to be. Every new primate species or fossil lineage we discover is another data point in the recipe. And the recipe, every time we look at it more carefully, looks more shared — not less. June: Alright, I want to end today with something that I think will stay with you. Because for all the science — the brain regions and the D N A percentages and the taxonomic discoveries — sometimes the story that lands the hardest is a very simple one. A birth. A survival. A moment of continuation against the odds. June: This week, IFLScience reported on the birth of a Bornean orangutan at a conservation facility — and I want to tell you a little bit about why that matters so much. Bornean orangutans are critically endangered. Their population has collapsed by more than fifty percent over the past sixty years. The island of Borneo has lost vast tracts of the rainforest these animals depend on — cleared for palm oil plantations, for timber, for agriculture. The orangutans that remain in the wild are increasingly fragmented into small, isolated populations that struggle to find mates, struggle to find food, and face the constant pressure of a landscape that is being transformed faster than evolution can keep up with. June: So when a baby Bornean orangutan is born in a conservation setting — healthy, clinging to its mother, with that unmistakable wide-eyed look that orangutan infants have — it is not just an adorable moment, though it absolutely is that. It is evidence that the thread has not been broken. That the biology persists. That there is still a future for this lineage if we choose to protect it. June: And here's what I want you to sit with. An orangutan mother and her infant share a bond that researchers have described as one of the longest and most intense mother-offspring relationships in the animal kingdom — rivaled only by humans. Orangutan young stay with their mothers for up to eight years, sometimes longer. They learn everything from her: which fruits are ripe, where the water is, how to build a sleeping nest each night. There is no handbook. There is no instinct that covers it all. There is a mother, and a child, and years of patient teaching. Sound familiar? June: Chester Zoo has also been sharing images this week from rainforest research — first glimpses of great apes in habitat, captured by camera traps and field researchers. And there is something about those images — a face looking back at the camera with unmistakable presence — that I find almost unbearable in the best way. Because that face is not so different from ours. The eyes, the expressiveness, the sense that there is someone home. We didn't invent that. We inherited it. We inherited it from a common ancestor that we share with every great ape alive today, and the recognition we feel when we look into those eyes is not projection. It is memory. Deep, evolutionary, biological memory. June: I think about that baby orangutan a lot this week. Tiny fingers wrapped around a mother who has spent her whole life learning how to survive in a world that gets harder every year. And I think — that's the story of this planet right now. All of us — human and non-human — navigating change, holding on, hoping the future opens up rather than closes down. We are on the same side of the same story. June: Which brings me to where I always want to land with you. Intelligence is not ours alone. The capacity to plan, to grieve, to teach, to bond — these did not begin with us, and they do not belong only to us. They are primate inheritances, carried forward across millions of years in a shared D N A, a shared brain architecture, a shared way of moving through the world in relationship with others. When we protect these animals, we are not being charitable. We are honoring our own family. This is Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three organizations that believe in building better futures, and whose support makes this show possible. If these stories moved you or surprised you or made you want to know more, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with someone you think would love it. You'll find links to all the research and news stories we talked about today in the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay connected — and I'll see you next time.