New colobus monkey, ‘Likweli’, confirmed in DRC - news - Mongabay

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist and science communicator, and this show is my favorite thing I get to do. Every episode, I bring you true stories about our primate relatives — stories that are smart, surprising, and sometimes genuinely moving. Stories that remind us how much we share with the other beings on this planet. June: A huge thank you to our sponsors today: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense for their business; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We're grateful for their support. June: Today's episode is a big one. We're going to meet a brand new monkey species just confirmed in the Congo rainforest — a creature that reminds us the natural world still holds secrets. We're going to spend time with one of the most extraordinary individuals science has ever studied, a bonobo named Kanzi, who recently passed away at the age of forty-four. And we're going to look at what an eighteen-year dataset of great ape cognition is teaching us about the minds of our closest relatives — and by extension, about our own. June: The through-line today, as always, is this: how alike we truly are. Not metaphorically alike. Biologically, neurologically, emotionally alike. Let's get into it. June: So let's start with cognition, and I want to start here with Kanzi. Because if you've never heard of Kanzi the bonobo, I want you to know that whatever you imagine when you picture a primate learning language — whatever your mental ceiling is — Kanzi almost certainly exceeded it. June: Kanzi was born in 1980 at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a bonobo — Pan paniscus — the species that, along with common chimpanzees, sits closer to us on the evolutionary tree than any other animal alive. And Kanzi became, over the course of his life, one of the most studied, most remarkable nonhuman individuals in the history of cognitive science. June: Here's how it started. Researchers were actually trying to teach Kanzi's adoptive mother, Matata, to use a lexigram board — a board covered with geometric symbols, each representing a word or concept. Matata struggled. But Kanzi, who was just an infant tagging along during those sessions, watching, playing nearby — Kanzi picked it up on his own. Without formal training. He just absorbed it. Researchers realized he had been learning the whole time. June: By adulthood, Kanzi could use hundreds of lexigram symbols to communicate. He could understand spoken English — not just trained commands, but novel sentences he'd never heard before, with complex syntax. Researchers documented him correctly responding to sentences like "put the ball in the water" versus "put the water in the ball." He understood the difference. That's syntax. That's grammar. That is the scaffolding of language. June: And then there were the stone tools. Kanzi learned to knap flint — to strike stones together to create sharp flakes he could then use to cut a cord and open a food container. This is the same basic technique used by early hominins. The same technique that shows up in the archaeological record over two million years ago. Kanzi figured out his own refinement of the method — holding the core stone in one hand and throwing another stone at it to get a cleaner strike. He invented his own technique. June: Kanzi passed away earlier this year at age forty-four, which is a good long life for a bonobo. And the scientific community felt it. The people who worked with him felt it deeply. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the researcher most associated with his care and study, described him as someone — and I think that word is entirely appropriate — someone who had real relationships, real preferences, a real inner world. He liked blueberries. He liked watching movies. He liked making fires and roasting marshmallows. Not as tricks. As things he genuinely seemed to enjoy. June: I find it hard to talk about Kanzi without feeling something shift. Because here is an individual who — through no design of his own — became a kind of bridge. He showed us something we needed to see. That language, tool use, cultural learning, intentional communication — these are not hard walls separating us from the rest of life. They are gradients. And Kanzi lived right along that gradient, close enough to reach across. June: Now, Kanzi's story is extraordinary — but science doesn't run on single individuals. It runs on data, accumulated over time, across many subjects, with rigorous controls. And this brings me to something genuinely exciting that was just published: a dataset called EVApeCognition, which compiles eighteen years of cognitive research on great apes. June: Eighteen years. Think about what that means. Researchers at institutions studying chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans have pooled their data — thousands of cognitive trials — into one comprehensive, open-access scientific resource. This kind of longitudinal, cross-species dataset is rare. It's the kind of thing that lets scientists ask big questions. Not just "can this ape do this task" but "how do different species compare, how do individuals develop across time, what are the patterns?" June: The dataset covers things like physical cognition — understanding cause and effect, quantities, object permanence — and social cognition — understanding others' intentions, following gaze, learning from observation. And the picture that emerges is of minds that are genuinely, deeply capable. Not just clever in narrow ways, but flexibly intelligent across domains. The way we tend to think of ourselves. June: And this matters, because it shifts the conversation from anecdote to evidence base. It's one thing to tell the story of Kanzi. It's another to say: here are thousands of trials across decades, across species, and here is what the data shows us about the cognitive landscape of our closest living relatives. That is a scientific foundation. That is how you build real understanding. June: What strikes me most about this dataset — and about Kanzi's life — is that the more carefully we look, the more we find. Not because we're projecting. Because we're measuring. And the measures keep coming back with the same answer: these minds are real, complex, and kin to ours. June: Let's talk about our shared recipe. Because everything I just said about Kanzi and about great ape cognition makes more sense when you understand what's actually going on at the biological level. When you understand what we and the other great apes are actually made of. June: Here's the number I always come back to: humans and chimpanzees share approximately ninety-eight point seven percent of their D N A. Ninety-eight point seven. If you are trying to picture that, think of it this way — if you printed out the entire human genome as a book, the differences between your genome and a chimpanzee's genome would be scattered across roughly one point three percent of the pages. The rest? Nearly identical. June: And with bonobos — Kanzi's species — it's the same story. Pan paniscus and Pan troglodytes, bonobos and chimpanzees, are so genetically similar to each other and to us that for a long time scientists debated whether they were even separate species. They are. But they're close. Extraordinarily close. June: Now, one point three percent sounds small. And in some ways it is. But D N A is a dense language. Small differences in regulatory genes — the genes that control how other genes are expressed, when they turn on, how long they stay active — can have cascading effects. The size of our neocortex, the length of our childhood, the density of connections in our prefrontal cortex — these emerge partly from small regulatory differences layered over a nearly identical base code. June: What that means is that we and the other great apes are running on almost the same operating system. Our neurons look the same. Our neurotransmitters are the same. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin — the chemistry of mood, of reward, of bonding and attachment — we share it all. When a chimpanzee forms a friendship — and they do form genuine friendships, long-term, preferential, reciprocal bonds — the biological machinery underlying that friendship is recognizably the same machinery that underlies yours and mine. June: And it goes deeper than great apes. Even with more distant primate relatives — macaques, baboons, colobus monkeys — we share something like ninety-three percent of our D N A. Which means we share the basic recipe for a primate brain. For a primate social life. For primate emotions. The recipe just gets embellished differently in each lineage. Longer childhood here, bigger group size there, different color vision, different vocalizations — but it's variations on a theme. It's the same song in different keys. June: I think about this a lot when I hear about something like the newly confirmed Likweli colobus monkey from the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is a species — a whole species — that science has just formally recognized. It lives in one of the most biodiverse and threatened rainforest ecosystems on Earth. And it carries, inside every cell, the same ancient primate heritage that we do. A version of the same D N A that eventually, in our particular lineage, gave rise to language and art and curiosity and podcasts. June: When a new primate is confirmed — really formally confirmed, described, named — it's not just a taxonomic footnote. It's a reminder that the family is bigger than we knew. That there are more cousins in the tree. That the recipe for life, for a certain kind of aware, social, feeling existence — it's more widespread than we sometimes remember. June: Likweli. That's the name given to this colobus monkey newly confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was reported by Mongabay, one of the best environmental news outlets in the world, and it's the kind of story that gives me real hope. June: The DRC — the Democratic Republic of Congo — is home to the Congo Basin, the second largest tropical rainforest on Earth. It is extraordinary in its biodiversity. It's home to bonobos, forest elephants, okapis, and now — formally — Likweli. The confirmation of a new primate species in a region this significant is a big deal, scientifically and for conservation. June: Here's why it matters beyond the science. When a species is formally described and named, it becomes visible in a new way. It can be protected. It can be listed. It can appear on the maps that governments and conservation organizations use to decide where to focus resources. A species that doesn't have a name in the scientific literature is, in a bureaucratic sense, invisible. Likweli now has a name. June: And this discovery comes at a time when the Congo Basin is under pressure. Deforestation, mining, conflict — all of it takes a toll on the ecosystems these animals depend on. So the confirmation of Likweli isn't just a scientific moment. It's also a conservation opportunity. Scientists are already calling for protections for the habitat where this monkey was found. June: But I want to bring it back to something human too. Because this is where our third thread always lands — in the space between us and them, where the walls turn out to be thinner than we thought. June: There's a research story from the long-term chimpanzee study at Tai Forest in Ivory Coast that I think about when I think about what discovery really means. Christophe Boesch and his team spent decades studying the same community of chimpanzees. And over those decades, they documented things that genuinely changed how scientists think about culture, about teaching, about empathy. June: One of the things they documented was mother chimpanzees teaching their young to crack nuts. Not just allowing them to watch — actively teaching. Slowing down their movements. Repositioning stones. Showing, waiting, demonstrating again. That is pedagogy. That is a mother passing down knowledge intentionally to the next generation. June: Now here's the story that sits with me. A chimpanzee named Tina died in that community — probably of respiratory illness — and her mother, Brutus, carried her body for days. This is documented behavior. Chimpanzee mothers who lose infants often carry the body, sometimes for extended periods. Researchers interpret this, cautiously but genuinely, as grief. As something that functions the way grief functions in us — an inability or unwillingness to accept the absence of someone loved. June: We see it in other great apes too. Gorilla mothers do the same. Bonobo communities show behaviors that look remarkably like consolation — one individual approaching a distressed community member after a conflict, touching them, grooming them — behaviors that serve no obvious strategic purpose except to comfort. June: And then I think about Kanzi again. About the people who knew him and who are grieving him now. And I think — what a strange, beautiful, important thing it is that grief connects us. That the same ancient biology that makes a chimpanzee carry her lost infant makes us mourn a bonobo we've never met, because we read his story, and we recognized something. June: There's one more story from today's news that I want to bring in here, because it's uncomfortable, and I think that's important. Researchers studying a group of chimpanzees in West Africa documented something painful: a violent community split. A faction of chimpanzees broke away from the main group, and the separation was accompanied by aggression, territorial conflict, real violence. June: This has been observed before — most famously in Jane Goodall's accounts of the Gombe chimpanzee community in Tanzania, where a group that split off was systematically attacked by the original community in what Goodall described as something disturbingly like warfare. It shook her. It shook the scientific community. Because until that point, many people believed that organized intergroup violence was uniquely human. It is not. June: And this is where kinship gets complicated. We share with chimpanzees not just the capacity for empathy and grief and teaching and play. We share the capacity for coalition, for territory, for organized aggression between groups. These things come from the same evolutionary toolkit. The same ancient primate inheritance. June: What the researchers studying this new case emphasize — and I think this is the critical point — is that understanding the roots of human conflict requires understanding its evolutionary context. Not to excuse it. Not to say it's inevitable or natural in some fatalistic way. But because you cannot address something you don't understand. The fact that chimpanzees show this behavior tells us something about how deep these tendencies run, and therefore how much conscious effort, how much cultural and institutional work, it takes to move past them. June: We are the species that can study this. That can recognize it in our cousins and turn that mirror on ourselves. That capacity — for self-reflection, for choosing differently than our biology might push us — might be the most distinctly human thing we have. And it's a capacity worth using. June: So here's where I want to leave you today. A new monkey, Likweli, has been named in the Congo. A great bonobo named Kanzi has died, and the people who knew him are grieving someone remarkable. Eighteen years of data on great ape minds is being shared with the world. And chimpanzees, like us, are reminding us that the full range of primate behavior — tender and violent, generous and territorial — lives in all of us, rooted in a biology we share. June: The intelligence and feeling we experience as so particularly human — they are not ours alone. They evolved, slowly, over tens of millions of years, in a lineage of social, curious, emotional beings. And that lineage is still here. In the rainforests of the Congo. In the chimpanzees of Tai and Gombe. In the bonobos who learned to talk to us, and in the new cousins we're still discovering. June: This is Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you to each of them for making this show possible. June: If today's episode moved you even a little — if it made you see your primate family differently — please share it with someone. Subscribe wherever you listen, and check out the link in show notes for more on today's stories, including the Likweli discovery, the EVApeCognition dataset, and Kanzi's extraordinary life. June: Stay curious. We're all in this together — and the family is bigger and more wonderful than you might think.