Kanzi, a male bonobo with advanced language aptitude, has died at the age of 44 according to a statement by the Ape Initiative, the conservation and research center in Des Moines, Iowa, where he had lived since 2004.
As an infant, Kanzi, who was born at the Emory National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, accompanied his adoptive mother Matata to language lessons. But while Matata was not interested in learning from her human caretakers, Kanzi surprised them by quickly learning the lexigrams, or symbols that map to words, that the researchers were trying to teach his mother, in much the same way human children learn language by listening to their parents talking.
