Scientists Find New Monkey Species in Congo's Rainforest - ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English

June: Hey there, welcome to Kindred Minds. I'm June, a primatologist who has spent my career being absolutely delighted by our closest relatives — and even more delighted sharing their stories with you. Today's episode is packed: we've got a brand-new monkey species discovered deep in the Congo rainforest, a robot orangutan that solved a decades-old mystery, and some genuinely surprising science about how great ape minds work. The thread running through all of it, as always, is this: how much of ourselves we can see when we look carefully at them. A huge thank you to our sponsors — Ada, who helps clients bring A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting, that's Ahh-Go, silicon development consulting from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We could not do this without them. Alright — let's go meet some primates. June: So let's start with cognition, because there is a study making the rounds right now that I find genuinely fascinating, and also a little humbling. Researchers looking at great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans — have been finding that the way individual apes differ from one another mentally does not follow the same rules we see in humans. Now, what does that actually mean? In humans, when scientists measure cognitive abilities — things like working memory, processing speed, problem-solving — those abilities tend to cluster together in a way that psychologists describe as a general intelligence factor. If you're strong in one area, you tend to be strong in others. It's not a perfect rule, but it's a pattern sturdy enough that it's shaped how we think about minds for over a century. And for a long time, researchers assumed that because great apes are our closest relatives, they'd show the same pattern. Makes sense, right? Same evolutionary family, similar brains — surely the architecture of intelligence would look similar too. But the data keeps pushing back on that assumption. June: What scientists are finding is that in great apes, cognitive strengths and weaknesses are much more loosely connected. An individual chimpanzee might be exceptional at spatial memory — and chimpanzee spatial memory is genuinely extraordinary, by the way, some of them outperform humans on short-term visual memory tasks — but that same individual might be completely average at, say, a causal reasoning task. In humans, those abilities would tend to move together more. In the apes, they seem more independent of each other. And here's what I love about this finding: it doesn't mean apes are less intelligent. Not even close. It means their intelligence is differently organized. Evolution didn't hand every species the same cognitive floor plan. We share an enormous amount of neural architecture with great apes — and we'll talk about just how much in a few minutes — but somewhere along our separate evolutionary paths, the way those shared tools got wired together diverged. The researchers are careful to point out that this is still an emerging picture. But it's a genuine invitation to stop measuring other minds against a human yardstick, and start asking: what does intelligence look like from the inside of this particular life? June: And if you want a beautiful, concrete example of great ape intelligence doing something completely on its own terms, I have to tell you about the robot orangutan in Borneo. BBC Wildlife Magazine covered this recently, and the story is just wonderful. Filmmakers working with researchers placed a realistic-looking robotic orangutan in the rainforest of Borneo — not as a prank, but as a scientific tool. A way to observe wild orangutans without the disturbance of a human presence. And what the footage captured helped crack open a mystery that has puzzled primatologists for years. Orangutans are known to produce a vocalization called a kiss-squeak — they press their lips together and draw in air to make this sharp, carrying sound. Researchers have long observed that orangutans sometimes hold leaves or bunches of leaves up to their mouths when they do this, and the sound comes out lower, more resonant. But why? What's the point of that? June: The robot allowed the team to watch what happened when a wild orangutan encountered what it perceived as a stranger — a potential rival or threat — without that orangutan being aware it was being observed in the way it would be aware of a human researcher. And what they saw confirmed something remarkable. The orangutans were deliberately using the leaves as an acoustic tool. By cupping leaves around their mouths, they were lowering the frequency of the kiss-squeak — making themselves sound larger than they are. It's acoustic deception. It's the orangutan equivalent of puffing yourself up. And the thing that gets me is the sophistication of it. The orangutan isn't just reacting instinctively — it's selecting a material from its environment, using it in a precise way, to create a specific effect on another individual's perception. That is multi-step, intentional, socially-directed problem solving. That is tool use in the service of communication. And it's been sitting there in the Borneo rainforest, quietly happening, waiting for us to be clever enough to see it. June: Okay, let's talk about our shared recipe. Because everything I just described — that capacity for innovation, for deception, for using tools, for reading other minds — it doesn't appear out of nowhere. It has a biological address. And that address is largely the same in us as it is in great apes. You've probably heard the statistic that humans and chimpanzees share about 98 to 99 percent of their D N A. Depending on how you measure it — coding genes versus the full genome — the numbers shift a little, but the ballpark is solid and it is extraordinary. Think about what D N A actually is. It's a set of instructions. A recipe. And the recipe for building a chimpanzee and the recipe for building a human are almost identical. Same basic chapters, same core ingredients, assembled in ways that are more similar than different. June: And that similarity goes so much deeper than just the famous number. We share with great apes the same basic brain structures — the same limbic system that generates emotion, the same prefrontal architecture involved in planning and impulse control, the same mirror neuron systems thought to underpin empathy and imitation. We share immune system designs. We share the capacity for complex social bonding, for grief, for play, for reconciliation after conflict. Chimpanzees console each other after fights. Bonobos use touch and physical affection to manage social tension in ways that feel remarkably familiar. Gorillas form long-term bonds with their family groups that last decades. None of this is metaphor. It's biology. The circuits that generate these behaviors in them are made of the same stuff as ours, built by the same evolutionary process, running on the same molecular machinery. June: And then there's the discovery that keeps coming — that there is more diversity within this family than we ever imagined. Scientists have just announced a new monkey species found in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congo Basin is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, and researchers working there continue to find species that were unknown to science. Now, this new discovery is a monkey, not a great ape — it's a more distant branch of our family — but every new primate species discovered is another reminder that the tree of life we belong to is richer, more complex, more surprising than our maps of it. Every one of these animals carries its own evolutionary story, its own set of adaptations, its own version of the shared primate recipe. And right now, the Congo rainforest holds more of those stories than we have yet told. That feels important. That feels like something worth protecting. June: Which brings me to the part of the show I always find both the hardest and the most necessary to talk about — what's at stake. And I want to do it through a story that is true and ongoing and involves real scientists doing something genuinely courageous. A research team based in Brno, in the Czech Republic, is in the field right now investigating new and emerging threats to gorilla populations in Central Africa. We tend to think of gorilla conservation as a story we more or less know — habitat loss, poaching, those are the classic threats. And they are real and they are devastating. But this team is looking at newer, less-mapped pressures: disease transmission, the impacts of climate shifts on forest structure and food availability, the cascading effects of regional instability on protected areas. These are threats that are harder to see and harder to address than a poacher with a snare, and in some ways that makes them more dangerous. June: What I find moving about this story is the humanity of it. A group of researchers in a mid-sized European city, looking at satellite data and field reports, writing grant applications, flying to Central Africa to crouch in the forest and count nests and collect samples — because they decided that gorillas matter. Not because gorillas are useful to us, not because they can be monetized, but because they are extraordinary beings with minds and families and futures of their own. And they are ours, in the deepest sense. Gorillas share something like 98 percent of their D N A with us. When a mountain gorilla mother carries her infant, she is doing something that our shared ancestor did millions of years ago. The tenderness in that gesture is not a human projection — it is a biological inheritance we share. These researchers in Brno understand that. And they are doing the hard, unglamorous, essential work of trying to make sure gorillas have a future. June: I want to hold that alongside something else — the sheer fact of discovery. That we are still, in 2024, finding new primate species. New monkeys in the Congo. New behaviors in Borneo captured by robot cameras. New data on how great ape minds are organized. We do not fully know this family we belong to. And that's not a failure — that's an invitation. Every new species named, every behavior filmed for the first time, every study that complicates our assumptions about intelligence — all of it is the universe saying: there is more here than you thought. Pay attention. Stay curious. June: There is a moment I keep coming back to when I think about why this matters — not just scientifically, but personally. There's a well-documented story of a chimpanzee named Washoe, who was the first non-human animal to learn American Sign Language. Washoe lost an infant, and when her caregivers signed to her to ask if she was okay, she signed back a word that translates roughly as "cry." She had a word for her own grief. Whether that maps perfectly onto what we experience as grief is a question philosophers and scientists are still working through. But something was there. Some interior weather. And she had a way of pointing at it. That is — I don't have a more precise word for it than astonishing. It's not a metaphor. It's not us projecting. It's a being on the same branch of the same tree, reaching toward language to describe what is happening inside. June: And I think about what it means to live in a world full of minds like that — minds that feel, that remember, that problem-solve, that grieve, that play, that deceive and reconcile and care for each other. We are not the only ones doing this. We are the latest and in some ways the loudest version of something that has been going on in the primate lineage for tens of millions of years. Intelligence, sociality, emotional depth — these are not our inventions. They are our inheritance. And we share that inheritance with every chimpanzee, every gorilla, every orangutan in a Borneo forest making herself sound bigger than she is, every new monkey in the Congo who has been living its life perfectly well without a name from us. June: I find that deeply comforting, actually. We are not alone at the top of some cognitive mountain. We are part of a family. A large, diverse, ancient, complicated, mostly arboreal family, and we are lucky to be in it. June: So that's Kindred Minds for today. We looked at how great ape cognition follows its own rules rather than ours — and why that's a sign of richness, not deficit. We followed a robot orangutan into the Borneo forest and watched something that looked a lot like clever deception. We sat with the work of scientists in Brno who are quietly fighting for gorillas in Central Africa. And we remembered, as we try to do every week, that the intelligence and feeling we value so much in ourselves did not begin with us, and does not end with us. Kindred Minds is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three organizations doing genuinely interesting work, and we're grateful for their support. If today's episode moved you or surprised you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who might need a reminder that the world is full of remarkable minds. Show notes with links to all the stories and research we mentioned today are at the link in show notes. Stay curious, everyone. I'll see you next time.