China Launches Ambitious Collaboration to Map Primate Brains—Including Ours - Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)

June: Welcome back to Kindred Minds — the show where we pull back the curtain on our closest relatives and discover, every single time, just how much we have in common. I'm June, a primatologist and storyteller, and this is where true science meets genuine wonder. Before we dive in, a huge thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps organizations integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — brilliant minds in silicon development, from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We couldn't do this without them. Now — today's episode? It's a good one. We've got young orangutans learning life skills by watching their moms, a brain chemistry story that turned lemur mean girls into peacekeepers, and some capuchin monkeys doing something so strange and so thoroughly documented that scientists are still trying to wrap their heads around it. Plus, we'll zoom out and look at one of the most ambitious science projects on the planet right now — a map of the primate brain. Including ours. The through-line today, as always: how alike we truly are. Let's get into it. June: So let's start with primate cognition — and I want to take you to the rainforests of Sumatra. Picture the canopy. It's dense, it's wet, it smells like earth and green and everything alive. And up in those trees, there's a young orangutan watching her mother very, very carefully. Not playing. Not eating. Just watching. This is a behavior researchers call "peering" — and it turns out, it might be one of the most important things a young orangutan ever does. Scientists spent seventeen years — seventeen years — tracking wild Sumatran orangutans in the field, and what they found was that the key to one of the most essential survival skills these animals have, building a sleeping nest high in the trees, isn't instinct. It's observation. It's learning. Young orangutans who spent more time deliberately watching experienced nest-builders — especially their mothers, but also peers — got significantly better at constructing those nests themselves. And these aren't simple structures. A good orangutan nest involves selecting the right branches, bending and weaving them together, sometimes adding a roof for rain, a pillow of leaves. It's genuinely skilled work. June: Now, here's what I love about this. For a long time, there was this assumption — comfortable, convenient, very human of us — that culture and learned tradition were our thing. Our special gift. The idea that you watch, you learn, you pass it on — that felt uniquely human. But the orangutan data keeps pushing back on that. These animals have regional traditions. Populations in different parts of Sumatra and Borneo build nests differently, use tools differently, have distinct social habits — and those differences track with who's around to learn from, not just with genetics or environment. That is culture. Slow, patient, mother-to-child, peer-to-peer culture. And what the peering study adds is something beautiful — it gives us a window into the moment of transmission. The young orangutan isn't just accidentally picking things up. They are intentionally paying attention. There's something almost tender about imagining that — a small, rust-colored face, eyes fixed on a mother's hands, watching how she bends that branch just so. We do that too, don't we? We watch the people we love and we learn how to be in the world. June: And the stakes couldn't be higher for these animals. Orangutans spend almost their entire lives in the trees. A bad nest means a cold, wet, dangerous night. A good nest means safety, rest, the ability to function the next day. So the quality of what you learn — and who you learn it from — shapes whether you survive. Mothers in this study weren't explicitly teaching in the way a human parent might sit down and give a lesson. But they were present, they were skilled, and their young were watching. That transmission of knowledge across generations, that thread of learned behavior, is one of the things that makes a species resilient. It's one of the things that makes a species, in a very real sense, cultural. Sumatran orangutans are critically endangered. There are only about thirteen or fourteen thousand of them left in the wild. And knowing that this kind of rich, slow, intergenerational learning is woven into who they are — that makes their loss feel even more urgent. Each elder orangutan who disappears takes irreplaceable knowledge with her. June: Alright, let's talk about our shared recipe — because this week there's actually a story that connects directly to it, and it's a big one. China's Chinese Academy of Sciences has just announced an ambitious, large-scale collaboration to map primate brains. And I mean map — comprehensively, comparatively, across multiple species. The goal is to understand the neural architecture that underlies primate cognition, and crucially, to understand how the human brain fits within — and diverges from — that broader primate blueprint. This is the kind of science that makes me genuinely excited, because it asks exactly the right question. Not "what makes the human brain special and separate" but "what is the shared primate brain, and what did we build on top of it?" That framing matters enormously. June: Because here's what we already know, and it should stop you in your tracks every time you think about it. We share roughly ninety-eight point seven percent of our D N A with chimpanzees. With gorillas, it's around ninety-eight point three percent. Even with more distant primate cousins — macaques, for instance — we share something in the range of ninety-three percent. That is not a small number. That is the same biological recipe, with a few pages changed. The same basic architecture for building a brain, for wiring up emotions, for producing hormones, for structuring social bonds. And this brain-mapping initiative is going to let scientists compare, at extraordinary resolution, how those shared blueprints express themselves across species. Where do our neural circuits overlap with a macaque's? Where does the human prefrontal cortex — the seat of planning, of language, of self-reflection — diverge from a chimpanzee's? These are not just academic questions. They have implications for understanding neurological disease, for understanding what consciousness even is. June: There's also a story from this week that illustrates the shared recipe in a way I find absolutely gorgeous — and it comes from lemurs. Now, lemurs are often left out of the primate conversation because they're on a more ancient branch of the family tree. They diverged from our lineage a very long time ago. But they are still primates, still part of this family, and researchers studying them have just found something remarkable. In many lemur species, females are dominant — and I mean forcefully dominant. They eat first, they displace males, they're physically aggressive in ways that are pretty unusual in the mammal world. But in some branches of the lemur family, something shifted. Certain species evolved more harmonious, more egalitarian social structures. And the question scientists asked was: what changed biologically to make that happen? June: The answer, it turns out, lives in the brain. Specifically in the oxytocin system. Oxytocin — you've probably heard it called the "love hormone," though it does far more than that — is a neuropeptide that plays a central role in social bonding, trust, and affiliative behavior across mammals. And what researchers found is that the more harmonious lemur species have a different distribution of oxytocin receptors in their brains compared to their more aggressive relatives. The wiring for connection, for tolerance, for getting along — it changed. And that shift in brain chemistry correlated with a shift in behavior across generations. What I find so moving about this is that it shows us something profound: kindness isn't just a choice or a cultural value. It has a biological substrate. The capacity for harmony, for tolerance, for living peacefully alongside others — that can be built into a brain, selected for over evolutionary time. Lemurs evolved it. We evolved versions of it too. The oxytocin system is ancient, it's shared across primates, and it's one of the quiet architectural features that binds us together as a family. June: Now I want to end today with a story that is equal parts baffling and fascinating — and honestly, a little bit of a window into how culture, for better or stranger, can emerge in primate groups. Because this week, scientists published something they've never seen before in wild primates. On Jicarón Island, off the coast of Panama, a group of male capuchin monkeys began abducting infant howler monkeys. Not to eat them. Not in the context of territorial conflict. Just — carrying them around. Researchers documented five individual male capuchins carrying at least eleven different howler infants over fifteen months, all captured by a network of over eighty-five camera traps set up across the island. And here's the kicker: it started with one individual. One male capuchin — the researchers could identify him specifically — began this behavior, and then others picked it up. It spread through the group like a fad. June: Now, I want to be careful here, because the "why" is genuinely mysterious. The howler infants don't appear to benefit. The capuchins don't seem to be feeding them or raising them in any traditional sense. Some of the infants don't survive. Scientists are cautious about over-interpreting — this could be misdirected parental behavior, it could be a form of social signaling among males, it could be something else entirely that we don't yet have the framework to understand. What we can say with confidence is that this is a documented, spontaneous, socially-transmitted behavior — a tradition that emerged within a specific group and spread through observation and imitation. That's the signature of culture. Weird culture, uncomfortable culture in some ways, but culture. And that is significant. June: What this story does, if you sit with it, is remind us that primate social life is not a simple, clean thing. It's messy and dynamic and surprising. Just like ours. Capuchins are among the most cognitively complex of the New World monkeys — they use tools, they have long memories, they form intricate social alliances. They are, in every measurable sense, intelligent animals navigating a complex social world. And intelligent animals in complex social worlds do unexpected things. They experiment. They innovate. They pick up each other's habits. The capuchin who started this — whatever was going on in his mind — triggered something that rippled through his community. Sound familiar? We are not the only species whose individuals change the behavior of the group. We are not the only species with social traditions that spread and evolve and sometimes puzzle even the most careful observers. June: And that brings me to the moment I always love best — the closing thought, where it all comes together. Today we watched a young orangutan learning from her mother in a Sumatran forest. We looked inside lemur brains and found the biological roots of kindness. We glimpsed an unprecedented scientific effort to map the primate mind — including ours. And we puzzled over a capuchin fad that reminds us how strange and alive and unpredictable primate culture can be. In every one of these stories, there's the same quiet truth underneath: intelligence, feeling, learning, belonging — these are not inventions of the human species. They are inheritances. Ancient, shared, written into the D N A and the neural circuitry of an entire family of beings. We are primates. We are kindred minds. And the more we understand our relatives, the more clearly we understand ourselves. June: This has been Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three organizations doing genuinely fascinating work, and I'm grateful for their support. If today's episode sparked something for you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who loves animals, science, or just a good story. Show notes with links to all the research we talked about today are at the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you next time.