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Panzee and Panbanisha are two apes with whom research is being carried out in the United States. Panzee (right) is a common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), while Panbanisha (left) is a Bonobo (Pan paniscus); these are two separate species. The basis of the research, headed by E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a US anthropologist, is to study the language faculties of non-human primates and to find out to what depth their upbringing affects their ability to use language.
Panzee and Panbanisha were reared in an environment with other bonobos and with human teachers. These teachers used keyboards with lexigrams on them in tandem with spoken communication in order to allow the girls to communicate back to them, and to allow the girls to learn to comprehend spoken and symbolic language.
The keyboards now in use contain a few hundred symbols, and the linguistic capabilities of these two is quite good. They are able to recognise not only digitised and spoken speech, but also the use of solely lexigrams from the keyboard. Kanzi (Panbanisha's brother) can even understand instructions from people using a telephone, and can associate a voice with a person without having to be able to concurrently see and hear that person.
Kanzi is also able to knap stone tools, with Kanzi receiving instruction from a human stone knapper.
The researchers claim that the experiments with these apes show that the gap between the genus Pan and our early hominid ancestors, and even ourselves, is much smaller than we had previously realised.