
Lucy, a chimp who was raised as a human - vezycash
http://vt.co/animals/stories/story-lucy-chimp-raised-human/
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dang
This isn't a very good article, but the story is interesting. Also about it:

[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/401/transcript](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/401/transcript)

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91706-lucy](https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91706-lucy)

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incadenza
This project, and others like it, strike me as an extraordinary waste of time.

Think of how remarkable it would be if Chimpanzees in captivity began to
speak. This would mean chimpanzees have the language capacity but, in every
observed chimp, it simply never occurred to them to use it?

It’s about as likely as finding a flightless bird somewhere and teaching it to
fly.

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jobigoud
It's believed that anatomically modern humans did not speak for many thousands
of years.

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Simon_says
Who believes that? It beggars belief that there would be evolutionary pressure
to develop the machinery for speech if intermediate steps were not being put
to progressively better uses.

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lucideer
This depends on your definition of speech I guess. Many animals have vocal
capabilities to create complex enough sounds that they could conceivably
construct perceptible human phonetics (not least parrots), but they don't do
so naturally in the wild. They do however all communicate with each other in
some form, much of it vocal; does that constitute "speech"?

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rossdavidh
While it seems patently obvious to us now, in the 21st century, that raising a
chimpanzee apart from other chimpanzees is a bad idea, I don't think it was as
obvious in the 1970's as the article makes out. Lucy had already been
separated from her mother at a young age before the researchers ever met her,
so it's not like a "natural" situation was even possible at that point. Now we
have people who know what is possible and what is not, in regards to
chimpanzee rehabilitation, but I think it was not so clear at the time.

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ravenstine
What a heartwarming ending...

It's interesting to me just how alienated from male chimps that she never
mated with any of them. My impression was that female chimps are much less
selective or resistant to sex.

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chmod775
> What a heartwarming ending...

You must have read a very different article from the one I just read or
skipped at least half of the second to last paragraph.

Or... this was just some unobvious sarcasm with questionable purpose.

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ravenstine
I thought the ellipsis would be enough to represent sarcasm, but I guess not.
lol

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jsjohnst
Definitely not from my perspective

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rasengan
Lucy’s end really pisses me off. How can there be such cruel pieces of sh*t
living in our world.

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viksit
Great piece, but I was struck with a thought about the researcher’s name.

Maurice Temerlin - that last name is so close to “Tamerlane”, the mongol ruler
that I wonder if there’s any correlation at all or would it just be a
coincidence that the names seem similar?

