Last Tuesday, June 19, one of the most famous monkeys of our time, the “talking” gorilla Koko, died at the age of 47. She was distinguished by a high level of intelligence, had a friendly disposition and, perhaps, even a sense of humor. But some features of her personality are little known to the general public - it is not customary to talk about such things, much less write in obituaries. And yet we will tell you.
Gorilla Koko and Penny Patterson at the very beginning of their acquaintance. Photo: BBC.
On July 4, 1971, the next anniversary of American independence, a female western lowland gorilla was born at the San Francisco Zoo, who was named Hanabiko (“child of fireworks” in Japanese), or simply Coco. A year later, Stanford University graduate student Francine “Penny” Patterson began working with the monkey, teaching it a modified version of American Sign Language (ASL). After her dissertation, Patterson did not give up on Coco: in 1976, she founded the Gorilla Foundation, and under its auspices the gorilla lived her entire life in a private reserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains near the city of Woodside, California (USA).
With the help of scientists, Koko mastered more than a thousand signs of “gorilla sign language,” as Patterson calls it, and understood about two thousand by ear English words. At the age of 19, Koko passed the mirror test, that is, she learned to recognize herself in the mirror, which most gorillas are incapable of. She was very fond of kittens, for which she came up with names herself, and on occasion she could boldly show a stern middle finger. She was like us in many ways.
In 1978, a documentary film was made about Coco, and the magazine National Geographic put her photo on the cover. The gorilla became a star. After that, she communicated many times with the stars of the human world. Coco dated Leonardo DiCaprio, tickled Robin Williams, grabbed William Shatner by the balls. And she, like many eccentric stars, had her own fetish: she liked human nipples, and she was not shy about asking her guests to show her tits.
National Geographic has featured Coco on its cover twice. Coco began to develop an interest in nipples in her twenties. Here, for example, are fragments of a conversation between a gorilla and fans, which took place in April 1998 using the AOL messenger and with the participation of Penny Patterson.
Penny: "Honey, let me tell you what we're going to do."
Coco: "Okay."
Penny: “We will talk on the phone with people who will ask us questions...”
Coco: "Nipple."
Patterson explained to the audience that by "nipple" Coco meant people: the two words rhyme English language, and the gorilla noticed this and came up with the idea of denoting “people” by pointing to his own nipple.
Question: “What are your kittens’ names?”
Coco: "Leg."
Penny: "Your pussy's name isn't Leg..."
Question: “Coco, what’s the name of your pussy?”
Coco: "No."
Penny: “Now she's just quietly puffing... And now she's shaking her head no...”
Question: “Do you like talking to people?”
Coco: "Nice nipple."
Penny: "Nipple" rhymes with "people", she's not showing the word "people" as such, but she's trying to use a similar sounding word..."
However, even when Penny and the audience tried to take the conversation in a different direction, Coco returned to her favorite topic over and over again.
Question: “What does she eat for lunch?”
Coco: “Candy.” Quicker. Candy!"
Penny: She'd probably really like lunch. She asks for candy right now. After lunch".
Coco: “Hurry up the candy!”
Penny: “She has vegetables for lunch... Raw vegetables and greens...”
Coco: "Nipple."
Penny: "Yeah, like a salad..."
Even in a passage with an attempt to raise funds for the Gorilla Foundation, Coco managed to include her favorite fetish.
Penny: “We are trying to find money to build a natural gorilla sanctuary. It will cost about $7 million, and we've raised less than half so far. So we hope that corporations and foundations will help us with this project..."
Coco: “Hurry, give me a tit in your mouth.”
The matter was not limited to gestures. In 2005, Nancy Alperin and Kendra Kepler, who had joined the Gorilla Foundation the previous year, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the foundation. According to their statement, Patterson forced female workers to bare their breasts and show their nipples in front of Coco if she “asked” for it with an appropriate gesture. “Oh yes, Coco, Nancy has nipples, Nancy can show them to you,” Penny said. Obviously, she believed that all this was for the benefit of the gorilla. “Coco, you only see my nipples all the time. You're probably pretty bored with them by now. You need to see new boobs,” Patterson said, according to the lawsuit. “I’ll turn my back now so Kendra can show you her tits.”
“It was normal practice to show the gorilla's nipples,” recalls John Safkow, former caretaker of the Gorilla Foundation. “What Coco wants, she gets.” I even had to hide my nipples from her until she took her pills.” One day, Penny Patterson forced him to bare his tits in front of other workers. “According to her, Coco was in a depressed mood at the time. We dressed up for Coco and acted silly to make her laugh. At one point, the gorilla approached the dividing net and asked me to show my tits. It was somehow uncomfortable to do this in public, so I told her: “Later.” But Penny put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Oh? I would not recommend refusing, because now Coco needs all our support, and immediately.”
Things were very different when celebrities and other guests with tight wallets arrived. “Coco wants to see their tits and points to her nipple and grunts excitedly,” Safkow shares. “But Penny explains to them: nipple sounds similar to people“Coco just likes people, blah blah blah.” However, the gorilla managed to feel Robin Williams' chest.
It's really hard to tell what Coco meant when she pointed to her nipple. Her gestures were, in principle, interpreted surprisingly widely by Penny Patterson and her colleagues. They could read “nice” as “rice”. “Foot” was interpreted as “man”. “Lip” (lip) – like “woman” (woman). “Bean” is like “cookies”. Or "shoes". Or "artichokes". Or "toy tiger". Or "jelly". If no explanation could be found for a gesture, it was interpreted as an insult. Or an expression of boredom. Or weird monkey humor. Just not to admit that a gorilla is not capable of truly learning sign language.
The famous primatologist Robert Sapolsky, criticizing this approach, noted that Patterson regularly “corrects” Coco’s gestures: “She asks: “Coco, what do you call this object?” And the gorilla shows a completely wrong gesture. Then Patterson says, “Oh, stop making jokes!” Then she shows her the next item, and Coco makes another mistake, and Patterson exclaims, “Oh, you funny gorilla!”
Former employees of the Gorilla Foundation also criticized Coco's conditions of detention, pointing out that she did not go out at all and spent all her time sitting in her trailer watching TV or sleeping. Her weight exceeded 120 kg, while in the wild, healthy female gorillas weigh from 70 to 90 kg. This was not least due to an unacceptable diet that included fried meat, chocolate, beer and other human pleasures. Often, workers had to stuff the gorilla with unhealthy food, otherwise it would be impossible to force it to take medicine. Every day Coco swallowed dozens of pills, and these were not only medications, but also nutritional supplements and homeopathy.
Koko the gorilla became famous primarily due to her incredible ability to learn and master new skills: she learned to speak sign language and learned more than a thousand words in this way, and moreover, she understood more than 2,000 spoken words in English. Koko was perhaps the only animal that had her own pets and gave them nicknames. The gorilla's life was amazing, but it also came to its end - on June 19, 2018, Coco died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 46.
Coco herself knew very well how special she was - the word "queen" was one of the first that she learned to describe herself. What can I say, at certain moments in her life her person received so much attention that she could really compete in her popularity with the royals. So, Coco twice appeared on the cover of National Geographic magazine - once with a photograph of a gorilla holding a small kitten, which she called "Ol-Ball" (Coco really liked rhyming phrases), and the second time with a selfie - Coco took a photograph of herself in the mirror on an Olympus camera.
Koko is a member of the western lowland gorilla, the most widespread species in Africa. However, Coco herself was not born in the wild, but in the San Francisco Zoo. Officially, her name was Hanabi-ko ("child of fireworks" from Japanese), but the short "Koko" quickly replaced it. full name and it was with this name that she became famous throughout the world.
When Koko was just a year old, she became part of a research program at Stanford University that was trying to figure out how lowland gorillas communicate. So, Coco became the ward of Frances “Penny” Patterson, who taught her most of the skills.
It is believed that Coco had an IQ of 95, which is within the normal range for a normal person. Of course, the gorilla did not have speech skills and was never able to understand grammar and syntax, but she fully understood what the future and past were and could communicate with people using her own methods.
The gorilla was quite capable of realizing and describing her feelings; she even understood such abstract concepts as “boredom” and “imagination.” When her friend Michael the gorilla tore his leg off rag doll Coco, she turned to him indignantly in sign language: “You dirty bad toilet!”
Moreover, Coco knew how to joke. For example, she sometimes called herself a “good bird” and pretended that she could fly, and then explained that it was just a joke. She could understand the images in photographs and relate them to her experiences. The most famous example of this skill was when Coco, who really disliked bathing, was shown a photo of another gorilla being led into the bathroom and said in sign language, "I'm crying in there."
Coco also had her own pets - since 1984, the gorilla began raising kittens. Even among all the possible illustrated books, she liked most of all those that told about cats - "Three Little Kittens" and "Puss-in-Boots." One day, for Coco's birthday, scientists offered her soft toy in the form of a cat, but Coco was not impressed by this gift - she liked live communication with cats much more. “She was very upset and showed signs of “sadness.” The next year, Coco was asked to choose a real kitten - so she got Ol-Ball, with whom the monkey fussed as if it were her own child.
One day, Coco tore a washbasin out of the wall, and when she was asked how this happened, the Gorilla revealed: “The cat did it.” Alas, the cat did not live long - he was hit by a car on the road. In one of the documentaries, Francis Patterson asks Coco "What happened to All Ball?" And Coco responds with gestures: “Cat, cry, forgive, love Coco.”
Another kitten Coco named Moo:
Coco's other pets:
Unlike her pet, Coco lived long life. Frances Patterson spent 42 years with Koko, training her and studying the gorilla's progress and reactions. This project was called Project Coco and became the longest-running study in history of how monkeys communicate. Gorillas typically live 35-40 years, sometimes living up to 50 years in captivity. Coco herself lived to be 46 years old (she would have turned 47 on the Fourth of July) and died in her sleep.
Coco meets actor Robin Williams:
Koko
According to a press release issued by the organization, Coco died on June 19 in her sleep. Gorilla was 46 years old and would have turned 47 on July 4th. Over her long life, Coco managed to master more than 1,000 signs of the American language of the deaf and dumb and learn to recognize about 2,000 English words by ear. With the help of gestures, the gorilla successfully expressed emotions - for example, he “told” how glad he was to receive a kitten as a gift, or shared his sadness about the death of his friend, the famous actor Robin Williams. Thanks to her ability to communicate and many other qualities, Koko gained worldwide popularity and made many people think about the intellectual abilities of animals. Coco's IQ level, according to various estimates, ranged from 75 to 95 points, which is only slightly less than the average IQ in the human population.
“She had a significant impact. What she has taught us about the spirit and intelligence of gorillas will continue to change the world,” the Gorilla Foundation said in a statement.
Coco was born at the San Francisco Zoo. At a young age, she was selected to participate in a language project led by a psychologist. Francine "Penny" Patterson. For the project, Patterson developed an adapted version of sign language and taught it to Coco. The gorilla was later acquired by the Gorilla Foundation and moved to Woodside, California.
Francine Patterson with Coco
During her life, Coco managed not only to learn, but also to teach a lot. For example, thanks to her, scientists learned that primates are able to hold their breath - before Coco began learning to play wind instruments, it was believed that monkeys could not voluntarily control their breathing.
Koko even had her own pets - kittens, and the gorilla herself gave them names such as All Ball, Lipstick and Smoky. All Ball escaped from the enclosure and died under the wheels of a car, and Coco was very upset about the death of her pet. According to Patterson, even 15 years after this incident, Coco remembered the dead animal. If the gorilla saw a photograph of a similar kitten, it would show with gestures that it was very sad.
Coco plays with one of her kittens
Coco also knew how to joke - she once “told” with gestures that she could fly and called herself a “little bird,” and later admitted that this was a joke.
Apparently, Koko was truly a unique gorilla. Unlike her brothers, she was able to understand that the reflection in the mirror is a “picture” of Koko herself (usually animals believe that there is some other animal of the same species in the mirror).
Koko - the gorilla who talks | trailer
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Those who cared for Coco and those who worked with her loved the “intelligent gorilla” very much. Now they are grieving the loss. You can express your condolences and convey words of support to employees who knew Coco by writing a letter to [email protected].
Baby Coco and Mom Francine
The talking gorilla Koko has died
The “talking” gorilla Koko, who communicated in sign language, has died in the United States. What the researchers managed to find out during the training and what other monkeys were able to teach to communicate, says Gazeta.Ru. On June 20, 2018, the “talking” gorilla Koko, who during her life had mastered more than 1,000 signs from the language of the deaf and dumb and learned to understand more than 2,000 words, died in the United States. The death of the 46-year-old animal was reported on the website of The Gorilla Foundation, the foundation that bought Coco from the zoo. According to the foundation's staff, Coco died peacefully in her sleep.
Koko the gorilla who talks | Preview | PBS
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Experiments on teaching monkeys the language of deaf mutes began in the 1960s. At that time, only chimpanzees were used for this - they were the most studied species of apes, and chimpanzees were also the easiest to keep in laboratory conditions. Gorilla psychologist Robert Yerkes, who worked with them in a number of earlier studies, did not give them the best reputation - he described them as "aloof, independent, stubborn and unpleasant animals."
Yerkes argued that in terms of obedience and kindness, gorillas are so far behind chimpanzees that they have no place in laboratories.
However, a young employee at Stanford University in California, a specialist in comparative and evolutionary psychology, Francine Patterson, decided to try to teach the gorilla Amslen - American Sign Language. She was inspired by the successes of scientists Beatrice and Allen Gardner, who were able to teach the Washoe chimpanzee 350 gestures. Moreover, when Washoe had a cub, she taught him sign language.
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Soon Patterson got the chance to conduct her experiment. On July 4, 1971, a female gorilla was born at the San Francisco Zoo, named Hanabi-Ko (Japanese for “sparkling child”), or Koko for short. By six months she was suffering from dystrophy and dysentery, which is why Coco had to be taken from her mother. Soon after successful treatment, Coco ended up in a nursery for young animals.
Patterson received permission to teach Coco in July 1972.
A few years later, Coco got a partner - a male lowland gorilla, Michael, who grew up in the wild and then fell into the hands of hunters.
The gorillas' successes were recorded in diaries and through video recording, and compared with similar data on teaching children the language of the deaf and dumb. The goal of the project was not just to study the process of learning words, but also to find out how gorillas use learned gestures.
The results of Coco and Michael differed - the latter quickly mastered several dozen signs, but then his development slowed down. Coco’s language abilities developed almost like a child’s - at first, learning was difficult for her, and in the first year she began to regularly use only 13 gestures, but in the following months there was a sharp jump, and by the third year of training, Coco had mastered almost 200 gestures. Patterson considered a gesture learned only if the gorilla used it without prompting for at least 15 days a month.
Coco reacts to a sad moment in her favorite movie
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There was also a difference in the vocabulary that Coco and Michael mastered. Coco learned more gestures to describe household objects and toys, and also actively used the signs “no” and “sorry.” Michael was better at naming body parts, animal names, and adjectives. Coco operated more with verbs.
She once apologized for her misbehavior: “I’m sorry, I bit, I scratched, I bit the wrong way because I was angry.”
Experiments with Coco and Michael showed the importance of early learning - Michael began to master gestures after the age at which Coco showed the best ability to remember. Experiments with other monkeys confirmed this conclusion - the later the training began, the more difficult it was to achieve any results. After five or six years it became completely useless.
Many researchers, however, were quite skeptical about Coco’s achievements, especially at first. In their opinion, in the experiments there could be a “clever Hans effect”, also known as the “experimenter effect” - a situation in which the experimenter himself unconsciously suggests the answer to the subject with his behavior.
The effect was named after the horse Hans, who became famous in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century for his ability to perform mathematical calculations. The horse beat off the results of the calculations with its hoof. As experiments by psychologist Oskar Pfungst showed, Hans could not count. However, he was able to sense the tension of the person asking him the question as the number of hoof strokes approached the exact answer. If Hans did not see the person asking the question, the accuracy of his answers rapidly decreased.
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So, in 1973, psychologist Herbert Terres began working on teaching sign language to a chimpanzee named Nim (after the linguist Noam Chomsky). However, Nim managed to learn only 125 gestures and composed sentences of only two words. Sometimes they were longer, but at the same time completely meaningless.
In 1979, Terres published a scathing article in the journal Science in which he stated: “An objective analysis of our data, along with those obtained in other studies, provides no evidence that the monkey's utterances are subject to the rules of grammar. The sequence of signs observed in Nim and other monkeys may resemble the first verbose utterances of children. But barring other explanations for the monkeys' combinations of signs, especially the habit of partially imitating recent utterances of instructors, there is no reason to consider these utterances to be sentences."
However, Nim was kept in conditions where his ability to communicate was severely limited.
He spent his entire life in the laboratory, while both Koko and Washoe interacted closely with people. Moreover, Nim received encouragement for imitating the actions of the instructors. Nothing prompted him to use gestures more widely.
Listening to music together
Observations of Koko and other talking monkeys showed that they used sign language even when spending time alone. Thus, Coco, looking at illustrated magazines, often commented with gestures on familiar pictures.
And the orangutan Chantek, who mastered about 150 gestures, not only used them, but also taught the caretakers of the primatological center, where he ended up in the second half of his life.
Monkeys turned out to be able to form new words based on already known ones. Coco called the masquerade mask a “hat for the eyes,” and the chair on which the potty stood “a dirty thing.” The chimpanzee Lucy, who had mastered only 60 gestures, was also not at a loss - she called a cup “drink glass red,” a cucumber “green banana,” and a tasteless radish “food pain crying.”
Self-portrait of Coco
The monkeys were able to use gestures not only directly, but also in figurative meaning. Washoe called an employee who did not give her water for a long time “dirty,” using the word as an expletive. Coco went further and addressed one of the workers who was unpleasant to her with a very rude construction - “you are a dirty, bad toilet.”
At the end of the experiments, the monkeys remembered the learned vocabulary for many years.
Thus, Washoe, whom the Gardners visited after an eleven-year break, immediately “called” them by name and gestured “Let’s hug!”
Sightings of Washoe and Koko reveal another amazing fact. When the monkeys were asked to divide a stack of photographs into people and animals, they confidently put themselves and monkeys they knew from research into the “People” folder, and assigned photos of unfamiliar monkeys to animals - cats, pigs and others.
In 2004, Coco had a toothache. She was able to convey This fact was known to the reserve staff and on the pain scale she rated her sensations at nine out of ten.
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In 2014, Coco reacted on the death of actor Robin Williams, whom she met in 2001. The comedian became the first person to make Coco smile for the first time in six months after the death of her friend, Michael the gorilla. “The woman is crying,” she indicated in sign language.
In total, Coco became the heroine of more than 50 scientific and popular science publications made by Patterson and her colleagues. According to researchers, her intelligence was not inferior to that of a human - the gorilla's IQ reached 95. In 1983, for Christmas, she asked for a kitten, but received a toy. The gorilla flatly refused to play with the replacement and said that she was sad. For her birthday, the researchers nevertheless gave her a cat, which she named Ball. However, the animal did not live long - one day it ran out onto the road and was hit by a car. Then Coco became depressed and constantly repeated: “bad, bad, bad” and “frown, cry, frown, sad.”
Meet Koko's New Kittens / October, 2015
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In 2015, Coco gave birth to two more kittens - Lipstick and Dymka. She said that she would like to have her own children. Coco had no offspring either from Michael, who died in 2000, or from her second partner, Ndume, who was brought in with her and Michael in 1990.
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Sources: New York Post | Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org
It is generally accepted that man is the crown of nature. This is true. But it is not enough to be born a man, you have to become a man. The intelligence of a three- to four-year-old child is equal to that of an average chimpanzee, and that of a two-year-old is equal to that of a smart dog. If he, like Mowgli, is left in the jungle and raised by wild animals, then after a certain age (they call it ten years) this child will never be able to adapt to human society and will forever remain an animal.
But this is all a separate topic, about which I plan to write a lot in the future. In the “abyss of confusion and debauchery” LiveJournal, let my useless blog bring knowledge and common sense to the masses - at least there will be some benefit. Therefore, I will introduce his two and a half readers to a monkey that is unique in some way. This is a gorilla, her name is Coco.
Despite the fact that gorillas are considered less developed than chimpanzees and much more aggressive, truly dangerous animals, Koko was taken to study by Stanford University professor Penny Patterson at a young age. The task was to teach the monkey the usual sign language spoken by deaf and dumb people.
Coco showed herself to be a very talented and capable of learning individual and after a few years she could already understand about 600 characters and show (read - speak) more than 350. Immediately there were septics and critics who claimed that Coco does not speak, she is “being an ape” , that is, he simply plays, copies the gestures of his teacher. But this has nothing to do with reality. Here is a simple example of Coco's developed abstract thinking. When she does not have an exact word to explain a new object or phenomenon, she synthesizes a concept from existing ones. When she was treated to a very hard shortbread cake, and Coco could not chew it for a long time, then she showed two gestures: “Cake” and “Rock”, adding a gesture of dissatisfaction and that she would not eat such cookies again. Or, for example, she asks for a banana, and they give her an orange, gets angry, and repeats: “No, Coco wants a banana!” until it is given to her. Or if she is given a yellow blouse for a walk, she says: “Give me the red one!” Because it is her favorite.
Coco also loves animals very much; for a long time she had best friend- a local cat with whom she played, stroked and protected, but one day he died. Coco worried about this for a long time and constantly showed with gestures that she was very upset and missed him. When Penny Patterson asked where she thought the cat had gone, Coco replied: “He went to a place where they don’t come back.”
Koko is very sociable, and as soon as she sees a new person or animal, she immediately addresses him in the language of the deaf and dumb. It’s clear that animals don’t answer her, and few people know sign language, so she quickly loses interest in them. But with some of her dolls she likes to conduct entire multi-hour monologues. Her sociability led scientists to the idea that it would be a good idea to introduce her to a male gorilla, who would also be trained to express himself with gestures first. And one was found. At first, Coco was reluctant to communicate with him, showing with his hands that he was “rude, aggressive, and I don’t like him!”, but then she got used to it and even began to demand regular meetings with him. Scientists hope that they will have offspring, and this raises the question: will they be able to independently teach their cubs sign language? Because there was a precedent, but on a small scale, and in relation to bonobo chimpanzees, but more on that next time.
Here's a couple of videos:
For those who do not speak English. Coco loves movies very much, and in one of them there is a very sad scene of the separation of loved ones. Coco constantly turns away at this moment.
And here is presumably the same male with whom they want to pair Coco:
Don’t think that the monkeys, like in the famous film, will one day grow wiser and take over the world. We did NOT descend from modern chimpanzees and gorillas, we diverged from them in evolutionary development approximately 12-15 million years ago, following our own path. They will not become smarter, because physiologically there is no way to do this, their brain is not so developed, their speech is not developed. But having a brain and speech does not guarantee development. Look around - in the world 95% of idiots of varying degrees of stupidity, and a person is not so much a biological category as an intellectual, strong-willed one. Therefore, the phrase that it is not enough to be born a person, you need to become one is completely justified.
