“Astonishing behaviour.” Filmmakers left a robot orangutan in the Borneo rainforest. The footage helped solve a mystery that puzzled scientists - BBC Wildlife Magazine

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist and your guide through some of the most surprising, moving, and genuinely mind-bending true stories about our closest relatives on this planet. Every episode, we pull back the curtain on primate life and discover just how much we share — not just D N A, but curiosity, feeling, ingenuity, and the will to survive. Today's episode has a lot going on — a robot orangutan planted in the Borneo rainforest that cracked a decades-old mystery, a new monkey species just discovered with a face that looks like it's been painted, and a look inside the primate brain that reveals something almost unsettling about how alike we really are. Before we dive in, a huge thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps organizations integrate A I into their workflows in smart, human-centered ways; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. We're glad to have them with us. Alright — let's get into it. June: So let's start with something that genuinely made me stop and just sit with it for a moment when I read it. Filmmakers working in the Bornean rainforest did something delightfully audacious — they built a robot orangutan, placed it in the forest, and let it sit there among real, wild orangutans. And what the cameras captured helped resolve a mystery that had been puzzling scientists for years. Now, the mystery in question has to do with how orangutans communicate. Specifically, how they use something called "kiss-squeaks" — these sharp, compressed sounds made by pressing the lips together and drawing air in — and crucially, what role their hands play in making those sounds. For a long time, researchers had noticed that orangutans sometimes hold leaves or bunches of vegetation up to their mouths when they make these calls. And the question was — why? Is it just incidental? A nervous habit? Or is it actually doing something functional? The leading hypothesis was that the leaves act as a kind of acoustic prop, modifying the sound — making it deeper, making it travel further, making it sound like a bigger animal. Which, if true, would be genuinely remarkable. It would mean orangutans are deliberately using tools not to build something or extract food, but to manipulate sound. To communicate differently. And that puts them in extraordinarily rare company in the animal kingdom. June: So the robot — which was designed to move just enough to be convincing without startling the animals — allowed cameras to capture close, undisturbed footage of wild orangutans producing these calls in their natural context. And the footage was described by researchers as "astonishing." What they saw confirmed that orangutans are indeed intentionally using leaves to modulate their vocalizations. And here's the part that I find almost poetic — they're not just doing this randomly. They do it specifically in situations of moderate threat. When a predator is nearby but not immediately upon them. As if they've worked out that this particular context calls for this particular acoustic trick. That kind of situational, flexible decision-making — choosing a tool, for a specific communicative purpose, in a specific social context — is exactly what we once thought was the exclusive domain of human cognition. And here it is, in the canopy of Borneo, in a primate who shares roughly 97 percent of their D N A with us. Language, or at least its deep evolutionary roots — the desire to be understood, to signal clearly, to manage how others perceive you — may be far older than we imagined. And it may have been rustling in the leaves of a rainforest long before any human ever opened their mouth to speak. June: Now let's stay with that thread for a moment, because what the orangutan leaf-tool story is really about — underneath the biology — is the primate brain. And that brings me to a study just published in Nature that I want to walk you through, because it's the kind of paper that sounds very technical but lands somewhere deeply personal. The study looked at something called the putamen — a region deep in the brain, tucked inside what we call the basal ganglia — and it asked a very specific question: how does the brain decide how much something is worth? Not in a philosophical sense, but in a moment-to-moment, decision-making sense. You see something. You feel something. How does the brain assign value to those inputs — visual and tactile — and then use that to guide action? What the researchers found, working with primate subjects, is that the putamen contains neurons that integrate value information from both touch and vision into a single, unified signal. The brain doesn't keep these separate. It converges them. And it does so efficiently enough to drive goal-directed behavior — reaching for the thing, choosing the option, acting in the world. Now, why does this matter to us? Because the human putamen does the same thing. The primate putamen and the human putamen are not analogous structures that evolved separately to do similar jobs — they are literally the same structure, inherited from the same common ancestor, doing the same job, in the same way. June: When you reach for a cup of coffee because you feel the familiar warmth in your hand and you see the steam rising — your putamen is doing exactly what a macaque's putamen does in the lab. When an orangutan reaches for a particular leaf because it looks right and feels right in her fingers — same story. Same ancient circuitry, doing the work. And I think that's worth pausing on, because we spend so much time in our culture talking about the human brain as this extraordinary exception — this unprecedented leap in nature. And it is remarkable, our brain. I'm not dismissing that. But the architecture? The deep hardware? That's shared. That's inherited. The circuits that assign value to experience and translate it into action have been running in primate brains for tens of millions of years. We didn't invent goal-directed intelligence. We inherited it. And when we look at an orangutan deliberately choosing a leaf, holding it to her lips, calibrating her call to match the level of danger she perceives — she's running the same ancient program. A program written long before either of us arrived on the scene. June: And now I want to bring in the part of today's episode that honestly hit me the hardest. Because we've been marveling at orangutan intelligence, at their tool use, at their finely tuned cognition — and I want to hold that alongside what's happening to them right now. The Guardian recently reported on the devastating impact of El Niño-driven wildfires on Indonesia's orangutan population. And the numbers are staggering. Borneo and Sumatra — the only two places on Earth where wild orangutans exist — have been experiencing fires of a scale and ferocity that's overwhelming the capacity of rescue organizations to respond. These aren't just forest fires in the abstract. They're destroying habitat that took millions of years to become what it is. Peat swamp forests that lock away enormous amounts of carbon, that host biodiversity found nowhere else on Earth, that orangutans have called home for hundreds of thousands of years. And the animals caught in the middle are being burned out, injured, displaced, and in many cases killed. Rescue centers in Borneo are being flooded with orangutans — many of them mothers with infants — who have nowhere left to go. One conservationist quoted in the piece said, simply, "the toll is huge." And that plainness felt more devastating than any dramatic language could have. June: What I want you to hold in your mind is this: we've just spent time understanding that orangutans are sophisticated communicators. That they choose tools for specific purposes in specific situations. That they have brains with the same deep circuitry as ours, assigning value, directing action, navigating a complex social and physical world. And now they are being pushed to the edge by a climate crisis that they did not cause, and cannot escape. There's a rescue and rehabilitation organization called International Animal Rescue, and groups like the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation who are doing extraordinary work on the ground — taking in injured animals, rehabilitating them, releasing them where there's habitat left to release them into. It's not glamorous work. It's heartbreaking, physically brutal, and often financially precarious. But it matters. And I'll put links in the show notes if you want to learn more about how to support them. What strikes me every time I read about this crisis is that orangutans are not a cautionary tale. They are not here to teach us a lesson about what we stand to lose. They are here. They are alive, right now, making decisions, raising young, communicating in a forest. And they deserve to keep doing that. Full stop. June: Okay — I want to bring a little wonder back in, because the natural world keeps delivering, even in the middle of everything hard. Because here is a headline I genuinely did not expect to read this week: scientists have discovered a brand new species of monkey in a national park — and this monkey has a bright orange mouth and nose. An orange face. Like, painted-on, vivid orange. The species was found in a forested national park, and it's described as visually striking in a way that sets it apart from known relatives. Now, new primate species discoveries are actually not as vanishingly rare as you might think — we've identified dozens in recent decades, mostly among smaller primates in tropical forests that are difficult to survey. But they never get old. Every one of them is a reminder that the tree of primate life is still fuller than we've mapped. There are still branches we haven't named. Still cousins we haven't met. And this one, with its vivid orange coloring on the face, is a gorgeous example of how evolution decorates its experiments. That orange isn't random — it's almost certainly a signal. A way of being seen by the right animals, in the right context, for the right reasons. Mate recognition, species identification, social status — color does a lot of work in primate social life. In fact, the diversity of primate faces alone is a field of research unto itself. June: What I love about a discovery like this is what it says about the state of our knowledge. We are not done. The inventory of life on Earth is not closed. And in a time when it can feel like everything wild and unknown is disappearing before we can find it, there's something genuinely hopeful about a bright orange face peering out of a forest and saying — I'm here. You didn't know about me. But I've been here all along. That feels like the natural world extending a hand. And I think we should take it. Now, let's zoom out a little — because I want to connect this new discovery to the deeper story of primate diversity, and what it tells us about our own origins. There are over 500 known species of primates on Earth right now. And what's extraordinary is the range. From the tiny mouse lemur, which weighs less than an ounce, to the gorilla, which can tip the scales at over 400 pounds. From the nocturnal aye-aye in Madagascar with its extraordinary elongated finger for extracting grubs from wood, to the Japanese macaque soaking in a hot spring in winter. This is one order of mammals. One branch of the tree of life. And the variation within it is astonishing. June: And yet — and this is the thing that keeps me up at night in the best possible way — underneath all of that variation, the genetic similarities are staggering. We share roughly 98 to 99 percent of our D N A with chimpanzees and bonobos. About 97 percent with gorillas. Around 96 percent with orangutans. And even with more distant primate relatives — Old World monkeys like baboons and macaques — we're sharing somewhere around 93 percent of our D N A. Think about what that means. That orange-faced monkey discovered this week? Its D N A is telling a version of the same story as yours. The same basic recipe. The same fundamental instructions for building a brain, a hand with grasping fingers, eyes that face forward for depth perception, a social animal that lives in groups and reads faces for emotional cues. The variations — the orange face, the long tail, the different vocal repertoire — those are edits. Refinements. Adaptations to specific environments over millions of years. But the underlying text? It's the same book. We are all reading from the same book. June: And I want to end today with something that brought together all of these threads in a way that I found genuinely moving — because it's not just a story about primates in trouble. It's a story about what happens when ecosystems find a way, against the odds. Researchers writing for Phys.org recently highlighted something quietly remarkable: some ecosystems are actually thriving. Despite climate change. Despite habitat loss. Despite everything being stacked against them. And among the examples they cited were chimpanzee communities in West Africa, in regions where local protections, community-based conservation, and shifts in cultural attitude toward wild animals have created pockets of genuine recovery. Now, this isn't cause for complacency. The overall picture for wild primates is still deeply concerning — more than 60 percent of primate species are threatened with extinction, and around 75 percent have declining populations. Those numbers are real, and we shouldn't soften them. But the existence of these success stories matters, because it tells us something important: recovery is possible. Presence is possible. When we protect habitat, when communities become invested in the survival of their wild neighbors, when the pressures ease even slightly — life comes back. Chimpanzees come back. The forest comes back. June: There's a particular chimpanzee community in the Taï Forest in Côte d'Ivoire that has been studied continuously for decades — one of the longest-running primate field studies in the world. And what researchers there have documented over the years is not just behavior, but culture. Tool traditions that are passed from mother to child. Nut-cracking techniques specific to that community. Medicinal plant use. Grooming rituals. This community has a history. A living, transmitted, cultural history. And it persists. Not because someone intervened with high technology — though conservation support absolutely matters — but because the forest was protected enough, and the animals were resilient enough, and the humans nearby cared enough. That's the formula. That's the recipe that works. And it's not so different, really, from what makes human communities resilient too. Protection. Care. The passing down of knowledge. The quiet miracle of continuity. We're more alike than we realize — not just in our D N A, not just in our brain circuits, but in what we need to survive and to flourish. Connection. Safety. A place to call home. June: And that, I think, is where I want to leave us today. We've traveled through the Bornean canopy with a robot and an orangutan who uses leaves to change her voice. We've looked deep into the primate brain and found the same ancient circuitry that runs in ours. We've mourned the fires, and celebrated a brand new orange face in a forest, and held onto the quiet hope of a chimpanzee community that's still there — still cracking nuts, still teaching their young, still living their intricate, intelligent lives. The intelligence, the feeling, the ingenuity, the grief — none of it is ours alone. We share this planet with minds that are kin to ours, shaped by the same long story of life. And I think the more clearly we see that, the better we become — at protecting them, at protecting each other, and at understanding ourselves. Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — partners who believe that understanding intelligence, wherever it lives, is how we build a better world. If this episode moved you or taught you something, I'd love for you to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a little more wonder in their week. All the sources, links, and conservation organizations mentioned today are in the show notes — check them out, and maybe follow one of those threads a little further. Stay curious. I'll see you next time.