by MAUREEN MCCARTHY
Washoe. PHOTO/Friends of Washoe
October 30th marked the five-year anniversary of the death of my friend Washoe. Washoe was a wonderful friend. She was confident and self-assured. She was a matriarch, a mother figure not only to her adopted son but to others as well. She was kind and caring, but she didn’t suffer fools. Washoe also happened to be known around the world as the first nonhuman to acquire aspects of a human language, American Sign Language. You see, my friend Washoe was a chimpanzee.
Washoe was born somewhere in West Africa around September 1965. Much like the chimpanzees I study here in Uganda, Washoe’s mother cared for her during infancy, nursing her, carrying her, and sharing her sleeping nests with her. That changed when her mother was killed so baby Washoe could be taken from her forest home, then bought by the US Air Force for use in biomedical testing.
Washoe was not used in this sort of testing, however. Instead, Drs. Allen and Beatrix Gardner of the University of Nevada chose her among the young chimpanzees at Holloman Aeromedical Laboratory to be cross-fostered. Cross-fostering occurs when a youngster of one species is reared by adults of a different species.
In this case, humans raised Washoe exactly as if she were a deaf human child. She learned to brush her teeth, drink from cups, and dress herself, in the same way a human child learns these behaviors. She was also exposed to humans using sign language around her. In fact, humans used only American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate in Washoe’s presence, avoiding spoken English so as to replicate as accurately as possible the learning environment of a young human exposed to sign language.
Washoe began to acquire ASL signs at a young age, and her sign acquisition increased with a pattern bearing many similarities to a young human child’s language acquisition. She used these signs to communicate with humans and, later, with other chimpanzees who also acquired these signs*.
Washoe’s use of ASL signs was groundbreaking. It altered our understanding of what it means to be human. Language was thought to have set us apart from other animals, making us unique among all species. Washoe and her chimpanzee family forced revisions of these old anthropocentric assertions. Later studies showed that all great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas—can acquire aspects of human language.
As impressive as Washoe’s role in our understanding of human-ness was, it was not what impressed me most about her. After all, by the time I met Washoe a decade ago, her contributions to debates regarding human uniqueness were well established. Instead, as an intern and later as a master’s degree student at Central Washington University, I was most impressed by the kind of being she was. Here are just a few examples.
Scientific American for more