Mountain Gorillas: Rising From the Brink of Extinction - World Wildlife Fund

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist and science communicator, and this is the show where we tell true stories about our closest relatives on this planet: the other primates. Stories that are funny and heartbreaking and astonishing, and that remind us, every single episode, just how much we share with the creatures we call our kin. June: Before we get into today's stories, a warm thank you to the sponsors who make this show possible. Ada — who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in smart, human-centered ways. Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC. And Zen Semiconductor — an umbrella company with a portfolio of businesses spanning the silicon industry. We're grateful for all three. June: Today on Kindred Minds — we're going to look at what it really means to use tools, and whether that makes us as special as we think we are. We're going to walk in line with baboons — and discover that the reason they do it might be the most relatable thing you'll hear all week. And we're going to visit a story of survival — a tiny monkey who almost lost her foot, and the people who refused to let that happen. Plus, we're checking in on two of the great apes — mountain gorillas and orangutans — one story that will lift your heart, and one that will remind us how much work is still left to do. June: Let's begin. June: So — thread one. Primate cognition. And today I want to talk about tools. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Tools — yes, chimpanzees use sticks to fish termites out of mounds. We've known that since Jane Goodall first documented it in the 1960s. But a new piece of research published in Nature has taken that question somewhere much more interesting, and much more philosophical. The paper is called "Modeling a Primate Technological Niche" — and what the researchers are really asking is: what does it mean for a species to occupy a technological niche? What does it mean to be, biologically and evolutionarily speaking, a tool-using animal? June: Here's why that framing matters. For a long time, we thought of tool use as a kind of trick — a clever behavior that certain smart animals happened to stumble onto. A chimpanzee picks up a stick. A capuchin monkey cracks a nut with a stone. Impressive, right? But the idea of a technological niche goes deeper than that. It says: for some species, technology isn't a party trick. It's a core part of how they survive. It shapes their anatomy, their social structures, their learning, their cognition — everything. Technology becomes woven into the biological fabric of the species itself. June: And when you frame it that way, something becomes very clear: humans are not the only species that has built a technological niche. We are perhaps the most extreme example — but we are not alone on that spectrum. And that matters enormously for how we understand ourselves. June: Think about what tool use actually requires. It's not just picking something up. You need to perceive an object not just for what it is, but for what it could become. A stick isn't a stick — it's a potential probe, a lever, a weapon, a bridge. That cognitive leap — seeing latent function in an object — is genuinely extraordinary. And primates do it. Not all of them, and not all to the same degree, but the capacity is there, distributed across the primate family tree in ways that tell us something profound about where it came from. June: Chimpanzees have been documented using tool kits — not just one tool, but sequences of tools used in the right order to accomplish a goal. There are populations of chimps in West Africa who crack open Coula nuts using a stone hammer and a flat stone anvil, and they choose their hammer stones carefully, selecting for weight and surface texture. Young chimps watch their mothers do this for years before they try it themselves. That's not instinct. That's cultural transmission of technical knowledge. That is, in a very real sense, education. June: And what the Nature paper is really pointing to is this: if you model the conditions under which a technological niche evolves — the ecological pressures, the social learning requirements, the cognitive prerequisites — you start to understand not just how primates became tool users, but how one lineage of primates eventually became us. It's a continuum. We didn't appear from nowhere with our opposable thumbs and our smartphones. We are the current leading edge of a very old primate story about figuring out the world through our hands. June: That is thread one. And I find it genuinely humbling — not because it diminishes what humans have built, but because it reveals the deep roots of it. Our ingenuity isn't a miracle. It's an inheritance. June: Thread two. Our shared recipe. This is the part of the show where we zoom out from behavior and look at biology — at the actual molecular instructions that build a primate body and a primate mind. And today I want to connect this to the tool-use story, because there's something in the biology that makes everything we just talked about make sense. June: Let's start with a number you may have heard before: chimpanzees and humans share approximately ninety-eight point seven percent of our D N A. Bonobos — the other species in our closest sister genus — are right there too, around the same figure. Gorillas come in at about ninety-eight percent. Even orangutans, who split from our lineage much earlier — around twelve to fifteen million years ago — share roughly ninety-six to ninety-seven percent of their D N A with us. June: Now, people hear those numbers and sometimes they think — well, ninety-eight percent, that's pretty close, but there's still that two percent, and that two percent must be where all the humanity lives, right? Where language lives, and abstract thought, and art, and science. But it's not quite that simple. Because that two percent — when you start to look at it — isn't a wall between us and them. It's more like a dial. Genes that both we and chimpanzees carry, tuned slightly differently. Expressed more here, less there. Switched on earlier in development, or later. June: The FOXP2 gene is a beautiful example. It's often called the "language gene" — which is a bit of an oversimplification, but bear with me. Humans have a version of FOXP2 that differs from the chimpanzee version by just two amino acid changes. Two. And those two changes appear to be associated with the fine motor control of the mouth and jaw — the precise muscular coordination that makes spoken language possible. Chimpanzees have FOXP2. It does important things in their brains and their vocal tracts. Ours is just ever so slightly retuned. June: And here's where it connects to tools. The same fine motor control, the same dexterity, the same neural pathways that allow us to produce complex speech — those are intimately linked to the neural systems for skilled hand movements. Language and tool use, in the human brain, are cousins. They recruit overlapping circuitry. And that circuitry didn't appear from nowhere in Homo sapiens. It was built, incrementally, across millions of years of primate evolution. The foundation was laid long before we arrived. June: There's a gene called HAR1 — Human Accelerated Region 1 — a stretch of D N A that is nearly identical across all mammals, but changed dramatically and rapidly in the human lineage after we split from chimpanzees. It's active in the developing human brain, in the neurons that help organize the cerebral cortex. The same cortex that allows us to plan, to imagine, to use language, to make tools. Chimpanzees have HAR1 too. Theirs is the ancestral version — the one that was stable for hundreds of millions of years. Ours is the accelerated version. But the gene itself — the place in the genome where that instruction lives — is shared. June: That's what I mean by a shared recipe. It's not that we and chimpanzees are identical. It's that we are reading from the same cookbook, with some of the same pages annotated differently. The ingredients are largely the same. The proportions vary. And across the primate family — gorillas, orangutans, baboons, capuchins, gibbons — you see variations on the same themes. Social bonding. Emotional life. Learning from others. Caring for young. Grieving. Playing. These aren't human inventions. They are primate inheritances. And we carry them because we are primates, full stop. June: Thread three. A meaningful primate-and-people story. And today I have two, because I cannot choose just one. June: First — the gorillas. Mountain gorillas are one of the most critically endangered primates on earth. They live in a small patch of high-altitude forest straddling the borders of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the Virunga Massif and the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. In the 1980s, there were estimated to be around 620 of them left. That's it. Six hundred and twenty individuals of an entire species, hanging on by a thread in the middle of one of the most politically unstable regions on the planet. June: And yet — they came back. The latest counts put the mountain gorilla population at over one thousand individuals. Over one thousand. That is the result of decades of dedicated conservation work: anti-poaching patrols, veterinary intervention, community engagement, gorilla trekking programs that gave local communities a reason to protect the forest rather than clear it. It is one of the few stories in great ape conservation where the trend line has moved in the right direction, and it moved because people decided it mattered. June: I want to sit with that number for a moment. One thousand gorillas. It is still heartbreakingly small. These are animals with rich social lives, with family bonds that last decades, with individuals who have names — Cantsbee, Gihishamwotsi, Titus — individuals who have been known to researchers and rangers for years. They grieve their dead. Silverback males protect their families with a ferocity and a tenderness that is genuinely moving to witness. And they are still here. Partly because of the places they live, and partly because enough people refused to give up on them. June: But the second story — the one about orangutans — is harder. And I think we have to hold both. June: The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation runs the Samboja Lestari research and rehabilitation center in East Kalimantan, Indonesia — one of the most important facilities in the world for the rescue and rehabilitation of Bornean orangutans. It has sheltered hundreds of orangutans over the years, animals rescued from the illegal pet trade, from habitat destruction, from the edges of logging concessions. And this year, it came under direct threat from forest fires. June: Indonesia's peat forests are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on earth, and they burn with a particular ferocity when they ignite — peat fires can smolder underground for weeks, and they are extraordinarily hard to extinguish. The fires that threatened the Samboja center put both the animals and the staff in danger, and they put years of rehabilitation work at risk. The orangutans being cared for there — learning to climb again, learning to forage, preparing for release into protected forest — are among the last of their kind. Bornean orangutans are critically endangered, with populations that have declined by more than fifty percent over the past sixty years. June: And here is the thing about orangutans that I always want people to know. They are the most solitary of the great apes. They spend their lives largely alone in the forest canopy, ranging over huge territories, meeting only to mate, or when a mother is raising her young. An orangutan mother nurses her child for longer than almost any other mammal — up to eight years. Eight years of almost continuous physical contact, of learning, of play, of teaching. When you see a juvenile orangutan in a rehabilitation center, learning to crack open fruit with a stone or to build a sleeping nest from branches — they are doing what their mother should have taught them. And the people at that center are doing their best to stand in. June: I find that devastating and beautiful in equal measure. The fact that we can step in at all — that we recognize what was lost and try to restore it — says something about us too. June: And then there's Lagertha. I have to tell you about Lagertha, because she is the most hopeful thing I have encountered in a long time. June: Lagertha is a newborn roloway monkey — a species so rare that there are believed to be fewer than two thousand left in the wild, scattered across the forests of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. She was born just months after her mother underwent surgery to save her foot from amputation. The mother — who is part of a conservation breeding program — had injured her foot severely enough that veterinarians were considering removing it entirely. Instead, surgeons performed a complex, delicate operation to preserve the limb. And it worked. June: And then, a few months later, her mother gave birth to Lagertha. A healthy baby girl, a new member of a species on the very edge of existence. The veterinarians who operated had no idea a pregnancy was coming. They simply chose to try to save the foot because it was the right thing to do — because the animal in front of them deserved that effort. And in doing so, they may have helped secure one more generation of roloway monkeys. June: I think about that a lot. The chain of care that had to exist for Lagertha to be born. The researchers who study roloway monkeys in the wild and document how few remain. The conservationists who maintain breeding programs. The surgeons who spent hours in an operating room on an animal most people have never heard of. And the mother, who endured all of it, and then gave the world her daughter. June: That is what it looks like when we remember we are on the same side. June: So — what do we take from today? A Nature paper that reminds us tool use isn't a human invention but a primate inheritance. The D N A we share — almost every letter of it — with the gorillas and orangutans and baboons we're worried about. Baboons who walk in line not for strategy, not for safety, but simply to be near their friends — which, honestly, is the most human thing I've heard all month. Mountain gorillas who crossed back from the edge of extinction because enough people cared. An orangutan center fighting fires to protect animals who are slowly learning to go home. And Lagertha — tiny, new, alive, a daughter of a species the world almost forgot. June: Intelligence and feeling are not ours alone. They never were. This planet belongs to all of us, and so does this story. June: Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you for listening. If this episode moved you — share it with someone. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And check the link in show notes for sources, research, and ways to support the conservation work we talked about today. Stay curious. Stay kind. And I'll see you next time.