Frans de Waal: Bridging the Primate-Human Divide - CREAF

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 about how they think, how they feel, how they love, how they grieve — and what all of that says about us. June: A huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in meaningful ways; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — who bring deep expertise in silicon development from A I all the way to SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with an incredible portfolio across the silicon industry. We are so grateful for their support. June: Today we have got a full house of stories. We're going to talk about the life and legacy of Frans de Waal, one of the greatest primate scientists who ever lived, and what he taught us about the minds of our relatives. We're going to meet a brand new monkey species — just officially discovered — with the most extraordinary bright orange lips, hiding in the forests of the Congo. And we're going to explore what a chimpanzee civil war can teach us about ourselves, how five generations of chimp family notes are being saved with A I, and why bonobos deserve a whole day of celebration. June: The through-line today, as always, is this: the more closely we look at the other primates, the harder it becomes to say where they end and we begin. So let's get into it. June: Let's start with cognition — with minds. And there is really no better place to start right now than with Frans de Waal, because the primatology world, and honestly the world at large, is still sitting with his loss. Frans de Waal died in March of 2024, and the hole he left is enormous — not just in science, but in the way millions of people think about animals and about themselves. June: De Waal was a Dutch-American primatologist and ethologist who spent decades studying chimpanzees and bonobos, and what he found — and what he spent his entire career trying to get the rest of us to accept — was that the emotional and social lives of other primates are not pale imitations of human life. They are the real thing. June: He documented reconciliation in chimpanzees. Not just that chimps fight — everyone knew chimps fight — but that after a fight, they come back together. They embrace. They kiss. They groom each other. He called it "consolation," and he described it with such clarity and warmth that it became impossible to wave away as mere instinct. June: He wrote books that changed the conversation — "Chimpanzee Politics," "Our Inner Ape," "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" — and in each one he was making the same argument, carefully, patiently, with mountains of evidence: that the cognitive and emotional complexity we see in other primates is not separate from our own. It is the evolutionary foundation of our own. June: One of my favorite things he pushed back on was what he called "anthropodenial" — which is the flip side of anthropomorphism. We all know anthropomorphism, the tendency to project human qualities onto animals in ways that aren't warranted. But anthropodenial, de Waal said, is just as distorting — it's when we deny that other animals could possibly have feelings or intentions or social sophistication, not because the evidence points that way, but because we're uncomfortable with the alternative. June: And the evidence, when you actually look at it, is staggering. Chimpanzees pass the mirror self-recognition test — they understand that the reflection is them. They mourn their dead. They form political alliances. They have been documented making and using tools across different wild populations, and crucially, those tool traditions vary from community to community — that's culture. That's not genetics, that's learned behavior passed down through generations. June: De Waal's great gift was that he never lost the wonder in all of it. He was rigorous — he was a serious scientist — but he also genuinely loved these animals. He wrote about them the way you write about people you care about deeply. And I think that's why his work reached so far beyond academia, why it landed for people who had never read a scientific paper in their lives. June: The field he helped build — the study of primate cognition and animal emotions — is thriving. And every time a study comes out showing that a bonobo can read a human's gaze, or that a chimp will comfort a grieving companion, or that macaques have a sense of fairness — all of that is standing on the foundation that de Waal spent his life laying. June: So if you haven't read him — please do. Start anywhere. Every book is a gift. June: Now, our shared biological recipe. Because here's the thing: the reason primate minds can do what de Waal described — the reason empathy and culture and politics and grief show up in chimpanzees — is that we are built from almost identical instructions. June: Human D N A and chimpanzee D N A are somewhere between 98.7 and 99 percent identical, depending on how you measure it and which regions of the genome you're comparing. That's the most commonly cited figure, and while scientists have nuanced that number in various ways over the years — looking at insertions, deletions, structural differences as well as single-letter changes — the core truth holds: when you read the chemical letters of a human genome alongside a chimpanzee genome, the similarity is profound. June: What does that mean in practice? It means we share the genes for building a large, folded brain. We share the genes for complex social bonding, for facial expression, for attachment between mothers and infants. We share the same basic architecture for processing emotion — the same limbic structures, the same neurochemistry. Oxytocin, the bonding hormone — which you've probably heard called the "love hormone" — works in chimpanzees. It works in bonobos. It works in monkeys. It's the same molecule, doing the same job, in the same kinds of social moments. June: This is what I mean when I say we share a recipe. Evolution doesn't throw out a good ingredient just because it's tinkering with the dish. The instructions for social intelligence, for caring about your group, for recognizing faces, for learning from watching others — those instructions were already in the genome of our common ancestor, somewhere between six and seven million years ago. We didn't invent them. We inherited them. June: And this is also why the discovery of a new primate species is so electrifying. Because every new species is a new data point in this vast family tree of ours. And this month — right now — scientists have officially described a brand new species of monkey found in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's being called Cercopithecus morae, and it has these extraordinary bright orange lips that just immediately set it apart from anything previously documented. June: The region where it was found, the Congo Basin, is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth — the second largest tropical rainforest in the world — and it's still giving up its secrets. The fact that in 2025 we can still find an entirely new species of monkey, a fairly large mammal, a primate, hidden in those forests — it's humbling and it's wonderful. June: And every new primate species we discover is also a new relative. Another branch of this family that shares our basic biology, our basic chemistry, our basic story. We didn't create that relationship by discovering the species. It was always there, written in the D N A, waiting. June: New species also remind us, in a very concrete way, how much we don't yet know — and how much there is left to protect. The Congo forests face enormous pressure from deforestation and habitat loss. Finding a new monkey there is a reason to celebrate and a reason to act. June: Alright, let's get to our people-and-primate story for today, and honestly I had a hard time choosing because we have some beautiful material. But I want to weave together two threads that I think belong side by side: the Gombe chimp archives and the chimpanzee civil war. June: So let's start in Gombe, Tanzania — which is one of the most storied places in all of primatology. This is where Jane Goodall began her long-term field study in 1960, and what she started there has never stopped. Researchers have been following the same chimpanzee community — and now their children, and their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren — for over sixty years. Five generations of documented chimpanzee lives. June: And for most of that time, the records were handwritten. Field notes, daily observations, behavioral logs — all scrawled by hand in notebooks in the forest and then transcribed or filed. The Jane Goodall Institute holds an enormous archive of this material. Decades of paper. Irreplaceable. June: Now, A I is being brought in to help preserve and process it. Researchers are using machine learning tools to digitize and structure those handwritten notes — to make sixty-plus years of observations searchable, cross-referenceable, useful to scientists in ways that would have taken a human team many lifetimes to accomplish manually. It's a remarkable marriage of old-fashioned dedication and cutting-edge technology. June: And one of the things that archive contains is documentation of one of the most disturbing and fascinating events in all of primatology: what researchers called the Gombe Chimpanzee War, or the Four Year War, which unfolded from 1974 to 1978. June: Jane Goodall herself witnessed it and was deeply shaken by it. The Kasekela chimpanzee community, which she had been studying, split into two groups — the Kasekela chimps to the north, and a splinter group called the Kahama chimps to the south. What followed was systematic. The Kasekela males, over four years, hunted down and killed every adult male in the Kahama group. They then absorbed the females and the territory. June: Goodall wrote about how disturbing it was to watch. These were animals she had known. She had names for them. She had watched them as youngsters. And now she was watching them conduct what looked, uncomfortably, like warfare — targeted, coordinated, sustained over years. June: NPR recently revisited this story in the context of what it can teach us about how societies fracture. And the research on it, now re-examined with fresh eyes and enriched by decades more of chimp behavioral data, suggests some sobering things. The violence wasn't random. It followed a period of social tension, resource pressure, and the slow erosion of what had been a unified group. Sound familiar? June: Now, I want to be careful here — and the researchers who study this are careful too. Chimps are not humans. Drawing a straight line from chimpanzee behavior to human political behavior is an oversimplification that de Waal himself would have warned against. But the shared evolutionary heritage means that some of the underlying social dynamics — coalition building, in-group loyalty, the consequences of group fragmentation — do illuminate something about deep primate social tendencies. Including ours. June: What Gombe gives us, across six decades, is not a mirror. It's more like a window with slightly different glass. The light bends. But something real comes through. June: And I think about the researchers who sat in that forest with their notebooks, day after day, year after year, writing down what they saw — the joys and the griefs and the politics of chimpanzee life. Now A I is helping ensure that none of that is lost. That Fifi and Flo and Frodo and Freud — yes, those are real chimps, Goodall named the Fs after the first family she came to know — that their stories endure. June: That's science. That's also love. June: And before I wrap up — a quick celebration. February 14th is World Bonobo Day. Yes, same day as Valentine's Day, and honestly that is very on brand for the bonobo. June: Bonobos are one of our two closest living relatives — tied with chimpanzees at roughly 98.7 percent shared D N A with humans. They live only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, south of the Congo River, and they are extraordinary. Bonobo societies are female-led and largely non-violent. They use social bonding — including physical affection — to resolve tension rather than escalate it. They share food readily. They show empathy toward strangers, even members of other groups. June: World Bonobo Day exists to raise awareness about how endangered they are — they're listed as endangered on the I U C N Red List — and how little most people know about them despite how closely related to us they are. There are probably fewer than twenty thousand bonobos left in the wild. June: Twenty thousand individuals. Of a species that shares nearly all of our D N A. That is a number that should stop us in our tracks. June: I hope today gave you a little of what this show is always trying to give: a sense of how large our family actually is. Not just the human family — the primate family. The mammal family. The living family. June: Frans de Waal spent his whole career trying to get us to see what was right in front of us — that intelligence and empathy and culture and grief are not inventions of humanity. They are the inheritance of life. They were here long before we arrived, and our relatives carry them still, in the forests, in the Congo, in Gombe, in sanctuaries and field stations around the world. June: A new monkey with orange lips reminds us there is still so much to discover. An archive of handwritten notes, now being read by A I, reminds us that the stories of these animals are worth preserving with the best tools we have. And a bonobo, somewhere south of the Congo River right now, is probably doing something that would make you smile and think — yeah. I recognize that. June: Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you for listening, and thank you to our sponsors for making this show possible. June: If today's stories moved you or surprised you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share the episode with someone who needs a little more wonder in their week. All the sources and links for today's stories are in the show notes. Stay curious, stay kind, and I'll see you next time.