Undiscovered Presents: Planet Of The Killer Apes

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Science, Life Sciences, Wnyc, Natural Sciences, Friday

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

In Apartheid-era South Africa, a scientist uncovered a cracked, proto-human jawbone. That humble fossil would go on to inspire one of the most blood-spattered theories in all of paleontology: the “Killer Ape” theory. According to the Killer Ape theory, humans are killers—unique among the apes for our capacity for bloodthirsty murder and violence. And at a particularly violent moment in U.S. history, the idea stuck! It even made its way into one of the most iconic scenes in film history. Until a female chimp named Passion showed the world that we might not be so special after all.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there again. I'm here to tell you that our podcast, Undiscovered, is back this week with one final episode.
0:07.4	So without further ado, here are Annie and Ella with Planet of the Killer Apes.
0:13.2	So, Ella, you have seen the opening to 2001 a space odyssey.
0:18.3	A long time ago. Yes. Okay.
0:24.0	Chimps gathered around an obelisk?
0:24.9	Monolith?
0:26.1	Monolith?
0:26.5	Yeah.
0:26.9	All right.
0:28.0	So I'm going to refresh your memory.
0:31.7	This movie starts on a kind of rocky desert landscape.
0:33.7	We're watching an ape.
0:41.6	He is squatting in the dirt, kind of snuffling around next to this pile of animal bones.
0:53.8	And then suddenly he pauses, cocks his head, looks at the pile of bones and has a world-shattering idea.
0:59.2	What if I used one of these bones as a weapon?
1:13.7	And sure enough, in the very next scene, you see this confrontation between two groups of apes.
1:19.7	And, oh, our ape buddy wax one of those apes in the head with a bone.
1:25.1	Wacking while they're down, they've been neutralized.
1:25.7	Stop. This was the flash of insight.
1:29.3	The earth-shattering was I can whack other apes with bones.
1:34.4	Indeed.
1:34.9	Okay.
	...

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