Kanzi the Bonobo, Who Learned Language and Made Stone Tools, Dies at Age 44
What we learned about ape and human cognition from Kanzi the bonobo, who died this week
Kanzi the bonobo died on March 18, 2025, at the age of 44.
Kanzi the bonobo, who learned how to communicate with humans using symbols, has died at the age of 44. Raised and kept in captivity, Kanzi was the subject of many studies aimed at illuminating ape cognition and the origins of human language and tool use.
Why It Matters
Kanzi was not the first great ape to learn how to communicate with humans using symbols. Koko the gorilla and Washoe the chimpanzee learned signs that were adapted from American Sign Language. But unlike his predecessors, who acquired their skills through direct training from researchers, Kanzi developed an interest in such symbols on his own when his adoptive mother, Matata, was receiving lessons on how to use keyboard lexigrams to communicate. Kanzi went on to learn hundreds of symbols that represented various objects and activities, as well as some more abstract concepts. Sometimes he combined these symbols to create new meaning.
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Kanzi was also something of a technologist. Archaeologists Nicholas Toth and Kathy Schick, both at Indiana University, began working with Kanzi in 1990 to teach him and his sister Panbanisha how to make stone tools by using one rock as a hammerstone to remove sharp flakes from another rock called a core. “Kanzi slowly got more adept at flaking stone through time,” Toth recalls. Early in Kanzi’s training, he invented his own technique for making stone tools, throwing a flint cobble against a hard tile floor to remove larger flakes. He would then…
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