Critically endangered primate species introduced to Riverbanks Zoo - WIS News 10

June: Hey, welcome back to Kindred Minds. I'm June — primatologist, science storyteller, and someone who has never once gotten tired of watching a primate do something that makes you go, "wait… that's exactly what I would do." This show is where we bring you true, carefully researched stories about our closest relatives on this planet — the other primates — and explore what those stories reveal about all of us. A huge thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps organizations integrate A I thoughtfully into their workflows; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts working across everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We're so glad to have them along for the ride. Today we've got a lot of good stuff — baboons who walk with their friends just because they like them, a gorilla laughing out loud, a heartbreaking story about the world's rarest orangutans caught in a climate disaster, and a look inside the primate brain. By the end, I think you'll feel — like I always do — just how thin that line really is between us and them. June: Let's start with something that made me genuinely smile when I read it this week. Researchers from Swansea University have been studying how baboons move — specifically, why they tend to walk in the same lines, with the same individuals, day after day. Now, when you see a group of baboons traveling together in a consistent formation, the intuitive assumption is that it's strategic. Safety in numbers, right? Maybe the strongest or most dominant animals are at the front or the back, shielding the group. Maybe there's a hierarchy being enforced. That would make a tidy, logical story. But that's not what the data showed. What the researchers actually found is that baboons walk in line with their friends. That's it. That's the finding. The animals they spend the most social time with, the ones they groom, the ones they sit near — those are the ones they travel beside. Social bonds, not strategy, were shaping the entire structure of how the group moved through the landscape. And what I love is that the researchers introduced a concept to describe this: a "social spandrel." The term spandrel originally comes from architecture — it's the triangular space that appears between two arches, not because anyone designed it, but as a byproduct of the arches being there. The idea borrowed into evolutionary biology means an outcome that wasn't directly selected for, but emerged as a side effect of something else that was. In this case, the consistent travel formations weren't the goal — friendship was. The formations just… happened, because the friendships were real. Think about that for a second. These baboons aren't calculating who gives them the best tactical advantage on the savanna. They're just walking next to the ones they like. Which is, honestly, exactly what you do when you're hiking with a group of people. You drift toward your person. You don't think about it. You just end up beside them. And here's what makes this scientifically significant beyond the warm feeling it gives you: it tells us that in baboon society, social bonds are strong enough and consistent enough to structurally organize group behavior — without anyone being in charge of organizing it. That's a sophisticated social fabric. Baboons are Old World monkeys, and they live in complex, multi-level societies with real relationships that persist over time. They remember who helped them. They hold grudges. They have allies. And apparently, they have walking companions. The idea that this kind of companionship — not dominance, not fear, not survival calculus — is what shapes how they move together is genuinely moving to me. It's a reminder that the impulse to be near the ones we love is not a human invention. It is something much, much older than us. June: And that brings me right into what I want to talk about next, because the baboon story isn't just sweet — it's a window into something biological and ancient. The question of why primates are so socially complex, so emotionally nuanced, takes us straight to the brain, and to some really fascinating science about what we share. There's been a lot of conversation recently about what makes the human brain unique — and I want to engage with that honestly, because it's a real and interesting scientific question. We do have something genuinely unusual going on up here. The human neocortex — the outer layer of the brain responsible for things like reasoning, language, and planning — is extraordinarily large relative to our body size, even compared to our closest primate relatives. We have a density and connectivity of neurons that appears to be part of what allows the kind of abstract, recursive, language-based thought that humans do. But — and this is the part I always want to make sure doesn't get lost — the differences are real but they're built on a foundation that is almost entirely shared. Chimpanzees share somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of their D N A with us. Gorillas are right behind them. Even more distantly related primates — like baboons, like the species we'll talk about in a moment — share massive stretches of genetic code with humans. The same genes that build a primate brain, that wire up the emotion centers, that shape social behavior, that create the capacity for attachment and grief and play — those genes are largely the same across the whole order. The differences we see in cognition between species are often about degree, not kind. Baboons form lasting bonds — that's not a primitive version of friendship, that's friendship, running on much of the same biological hardware ours runs on. When we look at great apes, the overlap becomes even more striking. Chimpanzees have been documented using tools, planning for the future, deceiving rivals, mourning their dead, passing cultural traditions from mother to child. These aren't metaphors. These are observed, documented behaviors produced by brains built from instructions remarkably similar to ours. So yes, something happened in human evolution — probably a series of somethings, involving brain size, neural connectivity, the emergence of language — that gave rise to the particular kind of intelligence we have. But the recipe? Most of the recipe was already there. We didn't invent cognition. We didn't invent emotion. We inherited both, from a long line of primates who were already paying close attention to the world and to each other. June: Now I need to tell you something harder. Because this show is about truth, and the truth includes grief as much as wonder. There's a study out recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. It concerns the Tapanuli orangutan — Pongo tapanuliensis — a species that was only formally described by science in 2017, which makes it not just one of the rarest primates in the world, but one of the most recently discovered. There are estimated to be fewer than 800 of these orangutans alive. That's not a typo. Fewer than 800 individuals of an entire species, clinging to a small patch of highland forest in North Sumatra. And then, in a span of four days, extreme rainfall — the kind of extreme weather event that climate scientists are increasingly clear is becoming more frequent and more severe — killed an estimated seven percent of the entire remaining population. Seven percent. Gone. In four days. I want you to sit with what that means for a moment. These are animals with complex inner lives. Orangutans are among the most cognitively sophisticated primates on Earth. They plan. They use tools. They have extended childhoods — the longest of any non-human primate — during which mothers teach their young the specific forest knowledge they'll need to survive: where the fruit trees are, how to build a sleeping nest, which plants are medicinal. That knowledge, that culture, lives in individual animals and passes between generations. When animals die in an event like this, it isn't only lives that are lost. It's knowledge. It's culture. It's irreplaceable relationships and learned traditions that may never be reconstructed. And for a population of fewer than 800, losing seven percent doesn't just break your heart — it edges a species closer to a threshold from which there may be no return. The Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, has just introduced a critically endangered primate species to their collection, and stories like that — of zoos and conservation programs working to maintain populations, to do genetic banking, to buy time — matter more than ever in a world where a single week of rain can erase nearly a tenth of what's left. I think about the Tapanuli orangutan mothers who survived that storm. Who lost infants. Who are now navigating a forest that took part of their family in four days. Orangutans are largely solitary, but they are not without bonds. They feel loss. We know this. And I think knowing it — really letting it land — is the first step toward giving a damn in the way these animals need us to. They're not asking for our pity. They're caught in a crisis they didn't make. The least we can do is understand what's at stake. June: But I don't want to leave you only in that weight, because there's something else that happened recently that I think deserves to be celebrated. Because sometimes the universe gives you exactly what you need, and what it gave researchers this week was footage of a gorilla laughing. Actually laughing. Being tickled by a researcher and cracking up. Now, I know some of you might think — is that really laughing? Is it just a reflex, a vocalization? And that's a fair scientific question, and it's one that researchers have spent considerable time on. The answer — the careful, peer-reviewed answer — is yes. Great ape laughter is real laughter. It shares the same evolutionary roots as human laughter. When great apes — chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans — are tickled or engaged in rough-and-tumble play, they produce a panting, breathy vocalization that is functionally and evolutionarily homologous to human laughter. It signals joy. It signals play. It is an invitation for more of whatever is happening right now. The sound is a little different from ours — more breathy, less voiced — but the underlying biology, the emotional state it reflects, the social role it plays? The same. Laughter in primates predates human language. It predates human anything. It's one of our oldest inheritances, and when you see a gorilla throw their head back in the middle of being tickled, something in you recognizes it — because you're supposed to. Your brain is built to recognize that signal because the signal comes from the same ancient place yours does. When I watch that video — and I have watched it more than once, I won't pretend otherwise — what gets me isn't just the cuteness of it, though it is genuinely delightful. It's the recognition. It's the feeling of looking at something and knowing you are seeing a mind that feels pleasure, that experiences fun, that in this one unguarded moment is completely, uncalculatingly happy. And that mind, that feeling, is not separate from us. It's family. June: So here's where I land at the end of a week like this one. We have baboons who walk beside their friends just because they want to. We have gorillas laughing in the middle of the afternoon. We have orangutans — ancient, intelligent, irreplaceable — being swept away by storms they didn't cause, in forests being steadily reduced by pressures they don't control. And we have researchers, and zoos, and conservationists, and science communicators doing everything they can to close the distance between what people know and what the planet needs them to know. Intelligence and feeling are not things we invented. Joy, attachment, grief, loyalty — these are not exclusively human properties. They are primate properties. They are mammal properties. They are properties of life, shaped by hundreds of millions of years of evolution on this particular planet, encoded in D N A that we and our primate cousins share to a degree that should take your breath away. We are not observers of the natural world looking in through glass. We are part of it. Primates among primates. Kindred minds. Thank you so much for spending this time with me today — this is Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode moved you or taught you something, please share it with someone who might feel the same. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and check the link in show notes for everything we referenced today. Stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you next time.