Transcript for Lucy

All right, let's start with an encounter. Yes

So this is, well, our producer Lulu Miller was calling around trying to find some stories for this hour. Let's see. And she ended up on the phone with a woman named Barbara Smott. Is that any better?

You know, following chimps at a distance and writing that everything they do and that kind of thing.

So here's the reason we played that story because here you've got this moment where you've got a scientist, Barbara Smott's who's, you know, a trained scientist got scientific rule of objectivity and all that. And you know who he is, you know, she slips. And for just that moment, she's not really a human. He's not really a champ. The raincoat is the only important thing. The borders have dropped. It's really what's happened. Yeah. Now, what are you sitting in a borders? You know, between us and the animals, as being fixed. And most people would say this is good. Keep them there, keep us here, keep us separate.

Something you could either call incredibly stupid, or our last great hope.

So coming up, we've got two stories of a radical experiment in Sharon. Them Jadabumrod. I'm Robert Croitch. This is Radio Lab. Okay, story one. This whole show in a way began with a conversation with this fellow Charles Seber. I am an author and a journalist and he wrote a book called The Waschula Woods Accord, which is a great book, in which he tells a story which he told us in studio as well about a chimpanzee named Lucy. So let's just start at the beginning. Who is Lucy?

Lucy is a chimpanzee that actually, well, this was found out later, born to a circus entertainer born in their camp. What country are we in? In the US, they traveled up and down the east coast, the Maynull Chimpark show, something like that. They were very popular in the 40s and 50s. They were wildly popular apparently.

And so Lucy was born to two of the chimps that performed in this thing?

Yeah, and they used to do things like the Houston stage wrestling matches with UVNV. The he-man of the town would come in and challenge the chimps to a wrestling match. Really? What would happen? You know, a chimpanzee and adult chimpanzees, about five times, the strength of a human. And this sky would walk in thinking, you know, I'm going to give this chimper of money. And like, one swipe of this chimps four part of the sky would be carried out.

Okay, so getting back to our story about Lucy. This is a story that begins in 1964, and it's one that Charles would have never heard about, heading out bumped into this obscure old memoir. Long out of print. Yeah, what's the name of the book? Do you actually have it with you?

It's called Lucy growing up human. A chimpanzee daughter in a psychotherapist family by Maurice K. Tamerlin.

Maurice K. Tamerlin, he is the psychotherapist. And he's also the dad in this story in his wife Jane. He's a social worker. She's the mom. Now the thing to know was that especially for Maurice Tamerlin, this was more than just adopting a baby chip. This was an experiment. Yeah. He wanted to know, given the right upbringing, how human could Lucy become.

What he says early on in this book, would she learn to love us and perhaps have other human emotions as well?

Maurice Temerlin actually died in 1989, but these are his words, read by radio host David Garland.

He says that he and his wife Jane made all the arrangements. Went and got the chip from the day the infant was born.

And the baby was taken away.

memoirs goes on, but by the time she was about a year old. She was eating at the table with us.

You know, he really went at this with this sort of full bore earnestness. You know, when he calls her his darling daughter and I took great pride in my daughter's achievement, he does feel like a real parent to Lucy. She was so responsive to being looked at, held and stroke, but he's also to make no mistake treating this as a very intense cutting edge experiment.

The next phase of the experiment, which occupies a good deal of the book, involves one of those talents that we thought used to only be limited to us. Language. Okay.

Roger Fouts was called in by Maurice Temerland to address. Or, like, you know, crucial questions of the experiment. But you'd learn to talk. Right. And at the time, he was the guy. He'd just been part of a team that had proven for the first time that chimps could use sign language to communicate. So his job with Lucy. was to teach her how to sign.

Cry. Dirty. And he says the Lucy. Enough. Just sort of picked it up.

she learned some 250 signs and the big question is okay so is it near mimicry or are they able to spontaneously create words and put them together in a new original way and there's been a lot of anecdotal evidence that in fact Lucy did spontaneously create words in a later session when shown a piece of watermelon Lucy tasted it and she called it candy drink

This is Sue.

The grad student of yours, who says she didn't actually see that line take place.

But she told us that when she met Lucy, she was blown away by

As we get to this next part, this is sort of the midpoint of memoir. It's useful to sort of remember a basic fact of biology, speciation, happens. When you've got one group of creatures that gets divided into two, and then these two groups evolve away from one another. And eventually they get so far away from each other that they can't have babies.

Yeah, you're only sexually attracted to your own kind. That is essentially what a species is. Now this isn't something you're supposed to be able to learn or unlearn. This is just the way it is. Yeah. Which brings us to some troubling passages in the book. Beginning really on page 105. Can you read it? Yeah. And we should warn that this next minute and a half contains a sexual reference.

One afternoon around five o'clock, Jane and I were sitting in the living room when we observed this sequence of behavior.

Gin?

Yeah, yeah, she loved gin and tonics. That's actually not the important part. It's what happens next. She takes her gen, goes back to the living room, sits on the couch, and has really no other way to say this. She starts to masturbate. But even that's not the important part. It's actually in the very next moment that a boundary that took approximately 6 million years to establish dissolves. Mr. Timberland sees Lucy doing this, and he thinks, This, this is a perfect experimental moment. So he runs off to the mall.

By the copy of Playgirl magazine, and brings it back to her first full of naked guys. Yeah. And Lucy would masturbate to these center folds.

But Sue says that she was there for what happened next.

Had Lucy ever seen another chimpanzee?

She says they brought this male chimpanzee.

It was then, says Sue, that she realized that in every way that mattered, Lucy was no longer a chimper.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrod. Hey, and I'm Robert Crowwich. This is radio lab today. We're listening to a story about Lucy. We can use chimps.

Talks like a human. Even a little bit, anyway. It's actually attracted to humans.

And that says Charles is usually the point where the human owner throws in the towel.

And you know, there are people who really who can't have children who have chimps as their substitute children and they all have to go through that moment where the gym gets too big, too strong, too willful, too sexually mature and they invariably. relinquished the champ. But in Lucy's case, what happened? So in Lucy's case, the terminal is really hung on way longer than most. Lucy was 10 going on 11. They had by this time rigged up an entire portion of the house for this very strong, willful animal. You know, behind bars, you just padded rooms so you can buy.

Which defeats the entire purpose of the whole thing. That's right. That's right. Which she destroying.

Just aim with company? She would just jump on a guest and start bouncing up and down.

It was more and more challenging and time-consuming and upsetting to the extent that he and his wife finally said, all right, we can't do this anymore. This is too much. It's fair, man.

The memoir ends with a big fat question. What will happen to Lucy? In the final page, Maurice Temmelon says, well, we know we can't keep her, but we don't know what to do.

Hi. Is this Janus?

This is Janus Carter. Not only does she know the ending of the story, she's actually the key player in it.

Tickets are really long time to find Janice Carter. She lives in a remote part of Gambia in Western Africa. And then that'll become relevant in a second.

In fact, Janice says she was one of the few people who could actually handle Lucy, which was at her cage.

And then he gave us Janice ended up being in Lucy's life. At the exact moment, when the temperalins finally decided what they were going to do with Lucy. It's 1977. They had just spent a year traveling around the world looking at different options. Zoos, research labs, chimp retirement homes, which were these facilities that were springing up to house chimps like Lucy, and been raised by humans or in the circus. But every place they visited, she says, was just too depressing for them to cage like for this being that they essentially considered their daughter. And so the decision they came to was that the best way to honor Lucy, the best way to really make her happy was to simply let her go in the wild. And they asked Janus to help them do it. Did you have any idea or any experience of what you were getting yourself into?

So after a 22-hour flight, Janice, the Timmerlands, and Lucy arrive in Dakar, Senegal.

After they landed, she says they piled into a car, and made their way to a nature reserve, which was basically just a bunch of big cages. Sitting right outside in the jungle, so they get there, coaxed Lucy into one of these cages, say they're goodbyes for the night, and they leave her. to spend her very first night alone outdoors. After a few weeks, Maurice and Jane Tamerlin decided to leave, and the plan was at Janice for just a little while, with stay behind. You know, to help Lucy with the transition.

How long did you think you would be staying there?

Three weeks. Wow. It's worth saying that Janis Carter has actually never left.

The weeks turned into months, and then into a year, and still Lucy's stressed out. She's not eating her hair as falling out. By this point, no whole-nother group of chimps shows up at this nature reserve as her former captives like Lucy, and they start to deteriorate as well. So Janice decides what she needs to do is change locations. So she takes Lucy and all these other chimps to this abandoned island that she found.

It's not what happened. She says that when Lucy and the other chimps got to the island and she let them loose, they clung to her. During the day, she'd walk them around the island and point out to them, here are the fruits you should be eating. These are the leaves you should be eating, but they weren't interested in any of that stuff. Oh, no. They were actually more interested in her stuff, which was what they were used to.

Jan has figured the only way this is going to work is if she could somehow keep the chimps away from her and her tools. And so here's where she does something really radical. She had run into a couple of British army officers who were passing through the Gambion, some kind of wilderness training thing. And she somehow convinced them to build her a cage, a giant metal industrial cage, and to fly it over to her island. And drop it funk right in the center. The thing about this cage, is that it wasn't for the chimps. It was for her.

And in the beginning, she says her cage didn't even have a roof.

The only thing above her head was this fine wire mesh to keep the chimps out.

Oh, God.

After about a year since Janice, most of the chimps lost interest in her. Because they couldn't get her tools, she was stuck in a cage, they gave up. They stopped hanging around her and they just wand her off into the forest and forage for themselves.

But Janice would sign to Lucy. No, Lucy. Go. Lucy would then sign back. No, Janice comes.

No, Janice come.

And this went on and on.

But Lucy wouldn't move. She would just stand there waiting for Janice to help her.

Meanwhile, she wasn't foraging for herself. She was getting thinner.

But incredibly, Janice kept at this for years. She'd have to toss Lucy some food, some of hers, just to keep Lucy from starving. But she kept at it. And then one evening, after a really, really long day.

Janice and Lucy are walking through the forest, and they both stop because they're so beat and crash.

On the ground together.

And after that says Janice.

And actually, from that moment on, Lucy did start to make the effort and go off and be a champ. And be a champ.

That's Charles Seabert again.

And it was not too long after that that Janice went away and left the island.

Janice says she, you know, periodically circling a boat, just to keep an eye on Lucy. But she says she never not once, set foot on that island, at least not for a year. Then one day, she decided to go back.

She pulled her boat up to the tip of the island where there was a little clearance and she parked and she did. Lucy and the other chimps who'd heard the boat came out of the forest and into the clearing and Lucy and her walked toward each other.

And what did she do?

At that moment, somebody in Janice's boat snapped a picture of her and Lucy hugging. It's pictures that Charles Sever printed in his book and it's one of those images that when you see it, I don't know why. It just haunts you. Lucy has her head against Janice's chest and Janice has her arms around Lucy.

It's one of the more fraught moments you have to just look at the picture. I mean it sort of made me want to write the book. something about the complexity and the invertedness of that picture.

a year later, Janis went back to visit Lucy again, but when she got there this time, Lucy was gone.

She was lying right near the place where Janis's cage had been, just a skeleton.

It appeared that Lucy had been skinned.

And no one knows actually what happened. But because the hands were taken, which poachers do, they thought one of the conjectures would make it really unbelievably tragic, is that they think that Lucy, always the first to approach humans, just sort of gylously approached poachers, and not knowing that they were that, and that they just took advantage of their unwitting and overeager prey. But that's, that was Lucy's end.

Jen's Carter still lives in Gambia, where she now works not just with the chimps, but with the local population to protect the habitat for the chimps. And Charles Sebert's latest book, which is a really tremendous book, is The Washoe La Woods Award. Our sincere thanks to him for turning us on to the Lucy story. Also, if you go to our website, radiolab.org, you can see pictures of Lucy and Janis, and also that particular picture that I described of the hug. It's, let's just one of those pictures you really just have to see. It's at radiolab.org.

Hey, I'm Jad Abum, Ron.

I was feeling it. I'm Robert Crollwood. This is Radio Lab.

Yeah. And so the question that we want to ask now, and we asked this question, the Charles Sever, you know, guy who wrote a lot about chimps is, what's the lesson that we should draw from this?

It's a good question. I think what it says points back to something I said earlier that the only option now and the best way to dignify and honor like what they are, who they are, they're more than what's. is to fence them ourselves off from them in little pockets of their home that we leave alone. That would be coexistence.

So what do you do?

There's a place in Iowa where this is kind of happening. Kind of. We sent our producers to our regular check it out.

So to set things up, what was the name of this place?

Oh, there's a fence in the room?

What does he look like, is he big? He's pretty big.

Wow. Why?

Like, what did, like, are they really talking? So we decided to call it Bill Fields. Hello. Hello, hello. This is Bill. Hey, Bill, so we heard a bit of tape that Sorn recorded where you guys were outside and Consey was pointing at a hole or something. And it just sounded like you guys are having some kind of real bilingual exchange. I mean, is that really what was happening?

What is that sound like?

The first time it happened says Bill, he was a grad student and he and Kanzi were outside. I was sitting on a stop and Kanzi was sort of in a field nearby, but at a certain point he says Kanzi stopped what he was doing, term right Bill.

Don't you just ask yourself, like, really am I sure that's what I heard?

And so on, what about you? I mean, you were there. Do you buy what he's saying?

Why was the investigator screaming at Sue or what was she doing?

Okay. So just to fill out the scene, you've got Sue, Bill, and this investigator in one room in Kanzi in a different room behind some glass. So, Kanzi can actually see what's happening in their room. You can see that this investigator is getting angry with Sue, his human mom, getting more and more animated. It was professionally aggressive and loud. And what was the, what was the argument about?

And as Sue and this lady are arguing, what was Consey doing?

He walked in the Consey's room. Consey then went to the keyboard and told him, you have to punish that investigator for screaming at Sue.

He says, Sue was putting Conzi back in his enclosure, but Conzi pushed past her, ran down the hall, found Bill in his office.

Wow, sir.

Yes. So what did you do then? I mean did you just come back to the lab and did nothing happened or?

How would he do that? Would he type in his keyboard, sorry?

Bill says he'd use the keyboard to ask the other researchers to get Bill.

Finally, one afternoon, eight months later, one of his colleagues came up to him and told him, Kansie wants to tell you, he's sorry.

You can find more information about anything that you heard in this hour. At our website, radiolab.org. We've also got Lucy Pictures and Janice and Kanzi Pictures there. And you can subscribe to our podcast. That's radiolab.org. I'm Janip and Ryan. I'm Robert Croitch. Thanks for listening.