kanzi

Kanzi is a male bonono (species also known sometimes as Pygmy chimpanzee). He was born in October 28, 1980 at Yerkes field station at Emory University and moved to the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. Kanzi was stolen from her mother and adopted shortly after birth by a more dominant female, called Matata. According to his trainer, the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (both in the picture, here; Kanzi's the one with the Michael Jordan's jersey), Kanzi exhibits advanced linguistic skills. The interesting thing about this story is that Kanzi was never taught language explicitly. As an infant, Kanzi accompanied his mother to sessions where she was taught language through keyboard lexigrams. Kanzi, apparently, showed little interest in the lessons, and seemed to be paying no attention whatsoever. However, to the big surprise of researchers, one day where her adoptive mother Matata was not present, Kanzi began competently using the lexigrams, becoming not only the first observed ape to have learned aspects of language naturalistically rather than through direct training, but also the first observed bonobo to appear to use some elements of language at all.

In this video we can see Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi showing off. Whether this means that language is not specifically human but rather shared with other species, as she claims, it's controversial, i think, but this video is at least surprising and nice.