How strong are gorillas, and how do they get jacked eating salad? Can gorillas learn language? Why don't wild gorillas pass the mirror test? Are gorillas people? Come get the answer to all these questions and more on this episode of Species.
Summary
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When humans first encountered gorillas, they mistook them for people. Or to be a little more specific, |
| 0:08.9 | in the first written account of human gorilla contact, the adventurers mistook this creature for a person. |
| 0:17.9 | Humans have been living near gorillas for basically the entirety of our evolution, |
| 0:21.2 | and so I'm sure that the various groups near gorillas had a deep understanding of this animal |
| 0:26.2 | long before anyone wrote anything down. They certainly made contact sooner than that, |
| 0:30.6 | but the earliest written encounter between humans and guerrillas comes to us from 500 BC, from a group of Carthaginian |
| 0:41.3 | explorers. I'm just going to read you how they described their encounter with guerrillas. |
| 0:48.3 | Quote, on the third day after our departure, we arrived at a bay called the Southern Horn, |
| 0:55.6 | at the bottom of which lay an island like the former, having a lake, and in this lake another |
| 1:00.2 | island, full of savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, |
| 1:07.2 | and whom are interpreters called Gorillai. |
| 1:11.1 | Though we pursued the men, we could not seize any of them, |
| 1:15.5 | but all fled from us, escaping over the precipices and defending themselves with stones. |
| 1:21.9 | Three women were, however, taken, but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be |
| 1:29.0 | prevailed upon to accompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to |
| 1:36.3 | Carthage." End quote. If you didn't understand what happened there, what they were describing, |
| 1:43.0 | they stumbled upon what they thought was a group of humans, mostly women. |
| 1:47.5 | They tried to catch the men, they failed, they caught the women, tried to convince them to come with them, and when they fought back, they killed these people, skins them, and brought the skins to Carthage. |
| 1:57.3 | Human life was cheaper then, being a person didn't mean much, but this animal was still seen as a person. |
| 2:05.8 | This was in that dark time before Charles Darwin, back when humans saw themselves as magically different from other animals. |
| 2:15.0 | However, even in that age of biological ignorance, today's species, despite hair |
| 2:22.3 | and fangs, was so much more similar than they are different, that they actually broke through |
... |
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