The last of the 'talking' chimpanzees
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Tatu and Loulis are the last two surviving chimps from a series of experiments that began in the 1960s. The pair have spent their entire lives in captivity, including stints at facilities in Oklahoma and Washington, where researchers studied their ability to learn ASL—hoping to challenge the prevailing belief that only humans could use language.
Since 2013 they’ve been living at Fauna, where both chimpanzees continue to sign. Tatu, the more loquacious one, has mastery of 215 signs, while Loulis can use 78. Among their favorite things to talk to their caregivers about are food and activities. Tatu is partial to cheese and enjoys a nice cup of coffee or tea, while Loulis prefers asking his caregivers to play a game of chase.
Whether language is unique to humans has been a subject of fascination to linguists and scientists for centuries, and in the 1960s they began turning in earnest to one of our closest genetic relatives to finally put the question to rest. This research was pioneered by a pair of psychology professors at the University of Nevada, Reno, the husband-and-wife couple Allen and Beatrix “Trixie” Gardner, who sought to prove that under the right circumstances chimpanzees could learn a human language.
Their research began in 1966 with an infant chimp, taken from West Africa for use in U.S. Air Force experiments, whom they adopted and named Washoe. The Gardners raised Washoe as much like a human child as possible. She learned to use a potty (which she would call “dirty good” in sign language), played with dolls, and admired the photos in magazines.
