In the childhood of every human being and at the dawn of human history there is an amazing and, until now, unexplained leap from simple genetically programmed behavior to language, symbolic thinking, and culture. In The First Idea, Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker explore this missing link and [...]
For more than twenty years, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has been studying the linguistic and cognitive skills of a number of laboratory-reared primates. Recently, her work with Kanzi (a bonobo) has been acknowledged as having achieved a scientific breakthrough of stunning proportions: Kanzi has acquired lin[...]