Yeah, it was not you planting a photo of that..... 'thing' and then mentioning leaving it at a gay bar.....
Man, do we ever NEED that face- palm emoticon or what?
I found Koko fascinating; I think I read about the story way back when (before she had reached adulthood) in Nat. Geo. or similar. Then there were the occasional TV show or spotlight on her and I was always fascinated at how much and how fast she learned. The whole event gave me, and I think most of us, new insight into just how smart our ape brethren really are. Koko reasoned, deduced, concluded and then executed some really high- level mental abilities.
The lying incident was especially illuminating IMO: Koko was acting like a gorilla and broke the sink in her quarters. when Penny found the broken sink, she asked Koko what happened. Now Koko has had several assistants over the years and so was quite familiar with quite a few people who worked with her and were part of her life and space. Now for the clever part: Koko blamed one of these assistants for breaking the sink. When pressed, Koko expanded by using more words to describe the event, always careful to point out it was a particular assistant. Now that simply shows an extremely high level of mental ability that was thought to belong to man only but Koko was able to lie effectively, with purpose and an obvious understanding that she was deliberately misleading Penny and 'shifting the blame'. We know cats and dogs often know when they make a mistake and get caught but this would be like a dog backing up and pointing to the other dog next to it when the 'deed' was found. And I just do not believe our four- legged friends can reason on that level. But Koko could.
It would be a shame if this work is not continued with other great apes. Who knows, maybe an Orangutan is even smarter yet? There are four great apes, Chimps, Gorillas, Orangutans and Humans. Personally, I would like to know just how smart our distant 'cousins' really are.
BTW: this is just my personal view and I am not foisting it on anyone; for those who do not believe in evolution, a fair wind and a safe harbor, I have no conflict with that view at all. In fact, when anthropologists come up with new 'facts' and state them with no uncertainty, I find it a bit annoying because while there could be the strongest suspicion, believe and seemingly overwhelming evidence, in the end there are too many holes in our understanding of evolution to state very many things as absolute facts IMO. I would rather hear something such as 'the current thinking is that.......' or similar.
Brian (who may have evolved beyond the other apes but I have to wonder if any of them would have fallen down the stairs....?)
Well OK, sorry. But it was Brian that brought up FaceTwit and ruined the whole thing.
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That Koko what a great story, I'm sorry she is gone.