Like Humans, Great Apes Think Differently From Each Other - Association for Psychological Science

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds. I'm June, a primatologist who has spent the better part of two decades falling more and more in love with our closest relatives — and today I get to share some of that with you. 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 of companies across the silicon industry. We couldn't make this show without them. Now — today we're talking about primate personalities, ancient origins that will genuinely surprise you, and a tiny monkey with the most remarkable orange lips you've ever seen. The through-line in all of it? How alike we truly are. Let's get into it. June: So here's something that sounds obvious once you hear it, but is actually a pretty big scientific deal: great apes think differently from each other. Not just species to species — but individual to individual. Just like us. The Association for Psychological Science recently highlighted research showing that among great apes, there is real cognitive individuality. Some chimps are bold problem-solvers. Others are more cautious, more observational. Some orangutans are methodical. Others are improvisational. And these aren't just personality quirks in the colloquial sense — they translate into measurable differences in how these animals approach tasks, how they learn, and how they perform. June: Now, why does that matter so much? Because for a long time, there was a tendency — even in science — to think of non-human animals as running on a kind of fixed program. You know, as though every chimp was basically the same chimp, executing the same chimp software. And what this research pushes back against is exactly that assumption. These are individuals. They have cognitive styles. They have, in a very real sense, minds of their own. June: Think about what we know about great ape intelligence more broadly. Chimpanzees have been documented using tools in ways that vary not just from individual to individual, but from community to community — different groups use different techniques to crack nuts, fish for termites, or access water. That's culture. And within those cultures, individual apes are better or worse at certain things, more or less interested in certain problems. Sound familiar? Because it should. That is the texture of human intellectual life. June: There's something almost vertiginous about it, honestly. When you sit and watch a chimpanzee working through a puzzle — and I have, many times — you can see the thinking happening. You can see the moment of frustration, the recalibration, the little flash of something when it clicks. And researchers are now putting rigorous structure around what field primatologists have been sensing for decades: that the variation in how individual apes think is not noise in the data. It is the data. It is one of the most important things to understand about them. Because if they have individual minds, they have individual lives. And individual lives deserve individual consideration. June: And what's exciting is that understanding this variation could actually help us understand our own cognitive diversity better. Why do humans think so differently from each other? Why do some of us learn visually, some verbally, some by doing? Some of the roots of that variation run deep — deep into our shared primate ancestry. We didn't invent cognitive individuality. We inherited it. June: Alright, let's go somewhere even deeper now — let's go back to the very beginning of us. Of all primates. Because a new study has just rewritten what we thought we knew about where our lineage started, and honestly, I've been thinking about it for days. June: The conventional picture of primate origins was warm. Tropical. Lush canopy forests, abundant fruit, dappled light. That's where primates belong, right? That's where we evolved. Except — maybe not. A new study published recently suggests that the earliest primates may have actually evolved in cold, dry parts of North America. Not the tropics. Not the jungle. Cold. And here's the part that really got me: some of these early primates may have survived seasonal Arctic-like conditions by slowing their metabolism. Possibly even hibernating. June: Let me sit with that for a second, because it's wild. The ancestors of chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, gibbons — and us — may have been scrappy, cold-weather survivors. Hunkering down through brutal winters in a landscape that looked nothing like the rainforests we associate with primates today. What the researchers found is that dramatic climate shifts, rather than stable warmth, may have been a key engine of primate evolution. Stress, change, upheaval — that's what pushed our lineage to adapt and diversify. June: And there's something almost poetic about that, isn't there? Because the story of humans is also very much a story of adapting to change. Of moving into new environments, pushing into cold places, making do. It turns out that restlessness, that adaptability, may not be something we developed late in our evolution. It may be one of the oldest things about us. June: What I love about this finding is what it does to the map. We tend to think of primates as an Old World, tropical phenomenon — Africa, Asia, the equatorial belt. But the fossil evidence points to North America as a significant cradle. The earliest primate fossils we have come from places that are now Wyoming, Montana, Canada. Landscapes that today are nothing like a primate habitat. And the diversity of those early primates was remarkable — dozens of species, branching and radiating in response to a climate that was constantly shifting. June: And speaking of early primate fossils — there's another discovery that ties in beautifully here. Researchers recently described a tiny fossil: teeth smaller than a fingertip. That's it. That's all they had. But from those teeth — their shape, their size, the pattern of their cusps — paleontologists were able to identify what may be one of the earliest primate ancestors we've ever found. Teeth are extraordinary records. The way a tooth is built tells you what an animal ate, how it grew, where it sat in the evolutionary tree. And these particular teeth placed their owner right at the base of the primate family, tens of millions of years ago. June: I find that genuinely moving. Somewhere in the fossil record, in grains of ancient sediment, is the beginning of the line that led to ring-tailed lemurs and spider monkeys and bonobos and you and me. And we found a tiny piece of it — smaller than your thumbnail — and we could read it. That's what science can do. That's what it feels like to hold deep time in your hands. June: And all of this — the cold origins, the teeth, the ancient diversity — connects to the central biological fact that I want to sit with for a moment, because it never gets old. The D N A we share with our primate relatives is staggering. We share somewhere around 98 to 99 percent of our D N A with chimpanzees, depending on how you measure it. About 98 percent with gorillas. Even with more distantly related primates — like macaques — we share somewhere around 93 percent. We are not looking at cousins from across the room. We are looking at something much closer than that. June: Think about what D N A actually is. It's a set of instructions. A recipe. And the recipe that builds a chimpanzee and the recipe that builds a human are almost the same document. Same chapters, same sentences, with small but significant edits here and there. The genes that build our brains, our hands, our hearts, our immune systems — they are largely the same genes. Running the same programs. And when we look at primate cognition, at their personalities, at their emotional lives — we're not projecting humanity onto something alien. We're recognizing the same recipe expressing itself in a different body. A different life. But the same deep instructions. June: The cold-weather primates, the tiny fossil teeth, the cognitive individuality in modern apes — all of it is telling the same story. That the line between us and our primate relatives is not a wall. It's a gradient. A family resemblance written into every cell. June: Okay. Now I want to tell you about a monkey with orange lips. Because this is genuinely delightful, and it's also an important story about how much we still don't know — and how much is still out there waiting to be found. June: CNN recently covered the identification of a newly described monkey species — a species with distinctively orange lips that sets it apart from its close relatives. This discovery came out of careful scientific work: collecting specimens, comparing physical traits, sequencing D N A, and concluding that what looked like a known species was actually something new. A new branch on the primate family tree, confirmed. Given a name. Welcomed into the record. June: And this is something I want people to really feel, not just intellectually understand: we are still finding new primates. On a planet where we've been exploring and cataloguing life for centuries, we are still finding our relatives. That tells you something about both the richness of life on this planet and the urgency of protecting the places where that life lives. If we're still discovering species, we are almost certainly also losing species we haven't discovered yet. Quietly, without record, without even a name. June: The other story in today's lineup that speaks to this human-primate connection is the research from Florida Tech, which Discovery Canada is actually showcasing — work on primate and human behavior that bridges the gap between the lab and the wild, between what we observe in controlled settings and what unfolds in real primate communities. That kind of research matters because it's building the translation layer — helping us understand what primate behavior actually means in the context of their lives, not just in the context of our experiments. June: And that's really where I want to land today's third thread, because the meaningful story here is one that's unfolding in real time, all over the world. There are primatologists, conservationists, local communities, and researchers who have dedicated their lives to the idea that our primate relatives deserve to be known. Really known. Not as data points, not as conservation assets, not as proxies for human behavior — but as individuals. Communities. Minds. June: I think about the work being done in forests across Africa and Southeast Asia and Central and South America, where researchers have spent decades — in some cases their entire careers — sitting with primate groups. Learning their faces. Knowing their histories. Documenting their losses and their joys. There's a long tradition in primatology, started by people like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas — the Leakey Trio, as they were known — of treating primate communities with the same kind of anthropological care we'd give to human cultures. And that approach has transformed what we know. June: Because when you stay, when you watch, when you learn the individuals — you stop seeing a species and start seeing a society. You see grief when a mother loses an infant. You see joy in play. You see loyalty in long-term friendships between adult males who have traveled together for years. You see all of this, and it becomes very hard to think of them as other. They are not other. They are family. June: And the orange-lipped monkey — that little discovery — is a reminder that there are still introductions to be made. Still relatives we haven't met. That's not just a scientific fact. It's an invitation. To keep looking. To keep protecting the places where they live. To stay curious enough and humble enough to know that the family is bigger than we thought. June: There's also something I keep coming back to when I think about A I and technology and all the ways the modern world is changing — and this is where our sponsors feel genuinely relevant, not just as a thank-you — companies like Ada, helping people integrate A I into their work, or Ago Consulting pushing the frontiers of silicon development, or Zen Semiconductor building the infrastructure of the future — these are all human endeavors aimed at extending what we can do and know. And I think the best of that work, at its most meaningful, should help us know and protect the living world we're part of. Technology in service of understanding. In service of kinship. June: We are one branch of a very old, very complex, very beautiful family tree. And we have responsibilities to the other branches — responsibilities that come not from guilt or obligation, but from recognition. From knowing who we are and where we came from. From looking at a chimpanzee solving a puzzle and seeing, just for a moment, the same thing looking back. June: That's what Kindred Minds is about. And I am so glad you're here for it. Today we talked about cognitive individuality in great apes — that real, measurable variation in how individual apes think and solve problems. We went back to the ice and cold of ancient North America, where the first primates may have actually started. We marveled at teeth smaller than a fingertip that carry the record of our deepest origins. And we met a monkey with orange lips — a brand new branch on our family tree, just introduced. These stories all say the same thing: intelligence, feeling, individuality — they are not ours alone. We share them. We always have. Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode moved you or surprised you, please subscribe and share it with someone who might feel the same way. You can find links and sources in the link in show notes. Stay curious, stay open — and I'll see you next time.