(pensive music)
- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical eight.
Bi-pedal, naked, large-brained,
long the master of fire, tools, and language,
but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable,
yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from our
shared understanding of the past.
Carta brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible by the generosity
of humans like you.
(cheerful music)
- This is my pleasure to talk about my study on
Comparative Cognition in Primates.
Let me start from Japanese monkeys.
(audience chuckles)
Not many people recognize there are no monkeys and apes
in North America and Europe.
You have no American monkeys.
(audience laughs)
There are no British monkeys, French monkeys,
German monkeys, but we have snow monkeys in Japan,
that helps us to do the study of primates
that is called primatology.
In my case I have been working with chimpanzees
both in the wild in Africa, and the laboratory in Japan.
I have been to Congo, Zaire, to see the sister species
called bonobos, very charming creature.
And, gorillas, mountain gorillas,
who live in Rwanda, in Uganda.
And, I also went to Sumatran Borneo
to see orangutans.
So, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans,
they make, with us, our family, hominid.
So, traditional questions is as follows.
What is uniquely human?
Where did we come from?
But, however, human is one of the primates.
So, a little bit new angle, new questions.
I want to postulate, what is uniquely primates?
Where did we come from?
So that is the key question today.
So, I'm focusing on horses,
(audience laughs)
the representative of four-legged animals.
As you may know, the common ancestor of mammals
four-legged animals, nocturnal, small creatures
in the era of dinosaurs.
I like horseback riding,
and I know many people love horses,
but amazingly, there are very few scientific research
on horses, in comparison to dogs and cats.
So, human is unique.
One family has only 4 genera, so,
humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans,
but horses is also very unique and special.
Family horse has only one genera, one genus, called Equus.
So, only one genus, Equus, has several species
like horses, donkeys, and zebras,
and a longtime friendship between humans and horses
going back to 5,500 years ago.
But, as I have told you, not so many scientific
publication about the horse as a whole, as a creature.
So, my talk is From Primatology to Equinology,
a new discipline studies the horses in the wild
and in the laboratory.
So, my field site is in Portugal, called Serra Targa.
We launched a new project to study wild horses,
called garrano, in Portugal, using drones
to know the spatial distribution of individuals.
Also, we have identified a total of 26 groups
more than 200 individuals.
So, application of primatological way of research,
identification of each individual
to do the long term study.
Or even more in the parallel effort
we use touchscreen computer apparatus.
I have been using such a thing for chimpanzees.
So, now, horse can do it!
(computer bleeps cheerfully)
(audience laughs)
(computer bleeps)
(audience laughs)
(computer bleeps)
So, touch the large one to the left.
(audience laughs)
(computer bleeps)
To the left.
And to the right.
(computer bleeps)
(audience laughs)
So, this is really brand new (computer bleeps) experiment
to know the cognition of horses.
(computer bleeps)
(computer buzzes)
And not only the size but also the shape.
Please touch circle.
(computer bleeps)
Mmm.
(audience laughs)
(computer bleeps)
Yes, that's right.
(audience laughs)
(computer bleeps)
That's right.
(audience laughs)
(computer bleeps)
So, horse can do the
(computer bleeps)
discrimination of the shape, or even more, the number.
Number of dots.
Many?
Which is many?
(computer bleeps)
To the left.
(computer bleeps)
And to the right.
(computer bleeps)
And to the left.
(computer bleeps)
And to the right.
(computer buzzes)
Oops.
(audience laughs)
Or even more, horse succeeded to establish
the concept of horse by always touching
a picture of horses.
The horse, four legged animal, was the common ancestor
of four legged animals, about 66 million years ago.
A huge climate change and all dinosaur gone.
Then the common ancestor of mammals
dispersed into different niches,
for example flying into the sky.
So, bats are mammals, giving the milk to the offspring.
So, bats, please look at carefully.
The fingers you can see, so four legged animals
but flying through the sky,
now four legged turn to become like wing.
And, four legged animals going down to the water
like dolphins and whales,
now four legs transform to like fins!
How about monkeys?
Please imagine the monkeys in the tree.
It's not the sky, not the ground, not the water, but
in the tree, so this is really unique niche.
To hold the branches the four legged
turn to become four hands.
So, monkey are four hands animals.
Look like four legs, but if you carefully look
at the footprint, hand and foot, foot looks like hand!
So, four hands animals.
So, chimpanzees, yes!
(audience laughs)
Hand.
Look like hand, it's foot, and even gorilla, it's the same.
The foot look like hands.
Only human foot is unique.
It's not hands!
(audience laughs)
People may misunderstand.
Four legged animals walking and standing up
and we create our unique hands.
It's completely wrong.
Primatologists say four legged animals
turn to become four hands animals.
So, what is uniquely primates?
Where did we come from?
We came from four legged animals to four hands
to adapt to our body and life.
So, let's go back to the traditional questions.
The answer is from four hands primates to two feet humans.
From four hands to two feet, that is my conclusion.
So, let me proceed to my chimpanzee research
to conclude my talk.
I have been to Africa to study chimpanzees,
and chimpanzee do the vocal communication called pant hoot.
(hooting like a chimpanzee)
- [Man] Wow!
(audience laughs)
(audience claps)
- And you can hear the voice, then the cry.
(hooting like a chimpanzee)
(audience laughs)
Is this language?
It depends on the definition.
So a completely different question.
Does it learn human language, or not?
So, my project is called Ai Project,
is a sort of ape language study.
I tried to teach a chimpanzee in the primate research
of Kyoto University.
So, to make the long story short,
I'm showing ongoing research,
cognitive study in chimpanzees.
So, chimpanzee learned to touch the arabic numerals
in an ascending order.
And we tested the memory.
(audience murmuring in appreciation)
After touch one, the other numerals gone.
Okay, after I touch one, the other numerals gone, but,
chimpanzee can touch, two, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight nine.
- [Man] Wow!
- In an ascending order.
Okay, touch one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine.
Touch one, two, three.
Don't worry, you cannot do it.
(audience laughs uproariously)
So, chimpanzee can do it but we cannot do it.
So we are the first to show that chimpanzee
can be better than us.
(audience chuckles)
So, I postulated Cognitive Trade-off Hypothesis.
Trade-off between memory and language.
Our common ancestor may have this kind of immediate memory
that we lost in return, we got the language.
So, to know the details please go to YouTube
and put Matzuszawa Tradeoff.
Here is a 24 minute clip about this one and
already more than five million access
in the past three months.
So, what is uniquely human?
In short, my answer is imagination.
The power of imagination makes us human.
Power of imagination, we can understand others mind,
and based on understanding others mind, needs,
we share; sharing and giving is uniquely human.
But, chimpanzee also show altruistic behavior
in the forest, giving a hand.
Or chimpanzee, there is a unique way of education
called master-apprenticeship, to
pass the cultural tradition from one generation to the next.
Or even more, chimpanzee grandmother
teaching something grandson.
So, these kind of things are still waiting to be explored
by the researchers, so I want to continue
the study of chimpanzee in the wild and
chimpanzee in the laboratory.
So, thank you very much for your attention.
(audience claps)
Thank you very much.
(cheerful music)