Scientists find new monkey species in Congo's rainforest - Reuters

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist and science communicator, and this show is my favorite thing to make. Every episode, I bring you true stories about our primate relatives — the ones that make you lean forward and think, wait, that sounds like something *I* would do. Today we've got a lot to talk about. Scientists have confirmed a brand new monkey species hiding in a Congo rainforest. Researchers have been testing ape intelligence in ways that might genuinely shift how we define the word. And fires are threatening one of the most important orangutan research sites on the planet. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to our sponsors: 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 across the silicon industry. These are the folks who keep the lights on here, and I'm grateful. Okay — let's go meet our family. June: So let's start with cognition, because there's a study making the rounds right now that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about. BBC Wildlife Magazine covered it, and the headline says it beautifully — researchers tested the cognitive ability of apes, and it could change the way we think about intelligence. Now, I want to be careful here, because the word "intelligence" gets thrown around a lot, and it means different things in different contexts. What scientists have been grappling with for decades is this: we tend to measure animal intelligence by how well another species performs on tests that were designed by and for humans. And when you do that, you're going to get a skewed picture. It's a bit like judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree, right? So what these researchers did was try to move past that. They looked at great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans — and they tested a much broader range of cognitive abilities. Not just "can you solve this puzzle to get a grape," but deeper questions. Can you track what another individual knows versus what you know? Can you plan for a future that isn't happening right now? Can you learn something new from watching a companion? And what they found was striking. Apes were not just passing these tests — they were passing them in ways that showed flexible, context-sensitive thinking. Not just rote learning. Not just habit. Actual reasoning. One of the things that stands out to me is the research around what's called theory of mind — the ability to understand that other individuals have their own beliefs, their own knowledge, their own perspective that is different from yours. For a long time, scientists thought this was uniquely human. And then the evidence started accumulating. Chimpanzees, it turns out, will look where *you* are looking, not just where the food is. They track your gaze. They'll deceive a competitor who has information they don't want that competitor to have. They anticipate what you believe, even when that belief is wrong. That is sophisticated. That is not reflex. And studies like the one BBC Wildlife covered are pushing us to ask — what else have we been too quick to call "uniquely human"? Because every time we draw that line, the apes seem to walk right up to it. June: And that brings me to our second thread — what I call our shared recipe. Because when you understand the biology, the cognition stops being surprising. It starts being completely expected. Here's the number that I never get tired of saying out loud: humans and chimpanzees share somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of their D N A. Depending on how you count — coding genes versus the whole genome — the figure shifts slightly, but we're talking about a difference of roughly one to two percent. That's it. One to two percent separates us from an animal who can recognize herself in a mirror, mourn her dead, use tools, wage war, make peace, and raise her children with patience and intention. Now, some people hear that statistic and they think, okay, but one percent of billions of base pairs is still a lot of differences. And that's true. Small differences in the recipe can have big effects — a pinch more of this, a different timing on that. The genes that regulate brain development, for example, are expressed differently in humans than in chimps, even when the underlying gene is almost identical. But here's what I want you to sit with: the *recipe* is largely the same. The same neurotransmitters. The same hormones — oxytocin, cortisol, dopamine. The same structures in the brain that process fear, reward, attachment, grief. When a chimpanzee mother loses her infant, she carries the body. Sometimes for days. Sometimes for weeks. Scientists who study this behavior — and it has been documented carefully — describe it as consistent with grief responses we recognize in humans. The biology that underlies that behavior is not alien. It is ours. And it's not just chimps. Go a little further out on the primate family tree and you get to gorillas — about 98 percent shared D N A with us. Orangutans, a little further still, around 96 to 97 percent. And then our newly described monkey cousins, further out — but still, primates all. Still carrying the same deep evolutionary instructions. The same basic cellular machinery. The same ancient nervous system wiring. When we discover a new primate species, we are not discovering something foreign. We are, in a very real sense, discovering a new branch of a family we already belong to. June: Which brings me to the story I most want to tell you today, and it's actually two stories woven together — because sometimes the news hands you exactly the right combination. Scientists have confirmed a brand new monkey species in the Congo rainforest. After twenty years of observations and debate, it's official. The species — found in the Democratic Republic of Congo — is visually distinct, genetically distinct, and may already be endangered. Twenty years. Think about that. There were people who saw this animal, who suspected something was different, who spent two decades gathering the kind of evidence science requires before it will say yes, this is real, this is new, this is here. And now it is here, named, known, counted. That is both thrilling and sobering in the same breath. Because the moment a species is named is often also the moment we discover how precarious its existence already is. And almost simultaneously, on the other side of the world in Borneo, fires are threatening the Tuanan research site — one of the most important orangutan research stations on the planet. The Guardian covered this, and it's serious. Tuanan has been running for over twenty years. It is one of the places where long-term orangutan behavior research happens — the kind of patient, decade-long observation that revealed just how complex orangutan culture really is. Different populations of orangutans have different tool traditions, different communication calls, different learned behaviors that they pass down to their young. That is culture. Not instinct. Culture. And the site that helped us understand that is now under threat from fire. I don't want to end on despair, because I don't think despair is the right response. I think the right response is what those Congo researchers modeled for us: twenty years of showing up, of paying attention, of insisting that this animal matters and that the truth about it deserves to be known. The researchers at Tuanan are doing the same thing. Conservationists, local communities, scientists — people who have looked at these animals long enough to understand that they are not just wildlife. They are neighbors. They are kin. And here's what I keep coming back to: the fact that we feel something when we hear these stories — the discovery, the threat, the persistence of the people trying to help — that feeling is not accidental. It's biological. We are wired for connection to the living world because we *evolved* in it, alongside these animals, shaped by the same pressures, the same hungers, the same deep need to survive and to belong. That feeling is your D N A recognizing its cousins. June: So here's where I land today. A new monkey species confirmed after twenty years of patience. Apes passing cognitive tests that challenge what we thought was ours alone. An orangutan research site threatened by fire, defended by people who refuse to give up. All of it pointing in the same direction — toward kinship. Intelligence and feeling are not human inventions. They are life's inventions, written into the biology we share with every primate on this planet. We didn't invent curiosity, or grief, or the ability to plan ahead, or the impulse to protect what we love. We inherited them. And so did they. This is Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode made you feel a little closer to something — to the world, to your own nature, to a chimpanzee you've never met — then please subscribe, share this with someone you think would love it, and come back next week. You'll find links to all the stories we talked about at the link in show notes. Stay curious, everyone. Our family is waiting.