IT MAY look like a child’s scribble, but this is the work of Popo, an adult female chimpanzee who lives at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute (PRI) in Japan. Her work, and that of three other famous apes – Washoe the chimp, Kanzi the bonobo and Koko the gorilla – went on show last month at a conference on ape art at Osaka University for Arts.
It may be fashionable, but the Kyoto ape art exercise also has a scientific point. Masayuki Tanaka and his colleagues at PRI are interested in the apparent disparity between chimps’ visual recognition skills – their ability to recognise another chimp from a line drawing, for instance – and their inability to produce pictures. Human infants scribble at around 18 months and begin to make representational pictures at three-and-a-half years old. Apes scribble from 20 months but can never draw.
Tanaka has adapted a notebook computer so that the screen is touch-sensitive and retains the chimp’s strokes as visible marks. This allows him to analyse not only the final creation, but also how each stroke is formed. He has found that adult chimps are capable of a range of complex and smooth strokes – the full repertoire of scribbles that a human infant acquires before the age of three – but infant apes produce only a subset of these.
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He attributes the difference to maturity of hand-eye coordination, but others have shown that in the wild, chimps learn to manipulate two or more objects at a time as infants, between the ages of one and two years. They learn to wield two stones to crack a nut, for instance. This kind of manipulation is essential for drawing, Tanaka believes, and both human and chimp infants have it, though they’re not equally skilled. There is something else that humans have, and chimps don’t – and what that is, nobody’s quite sure.
