Orangutans Can Mime (Which Is Not To Say They Should)

Sophomore year of college, a few of my friends and I took a train to Boston to go to the annual J.Crew barn jacket and drink-til-you-puke festival known as the Head of the Charles. Soon after arriving, we took the T to Harvard Square, where we were supposed to meet some people to drink the scorpion bowl thing at a Thai restaurant there. But when we got to the top of the stairs to the street, we found ourselves in a large crowd of people watching a family mime troupe performing their routine in order to raise money for a Christian charity organization. After watching along for a minute, we were about to move on when a man with an unkempt beard and green army coat walked out onto the bricks between the performers and the audience. He stopped, looking just like Belker from Hill Street Blues, glared around at all the eyes on him and shouted “I hate mimes!” Then he hunched his shoulders down into his coat and stomped away.

Hopefully, he was not on his way to Indonesian Borneo. Because if he was, he might really have had a problem with the orangutans there. A team of scientists working in the area report that orangutans engage in more complex thinking processes than had previously been attributed to them, and they display this through pantomime. As Kristin Andrews of Glendon College told Discovery’s Jennifer Viegas,

“Pantomime, like language, can be used to declare, lie, request, reminisce, tell stories, teach, explain and more. We saw cases of pantomime used to request and to deceive, which are typical examples of great ape communication but, interestingly, we also report one case of pantomime used to tell a story, to reminisce and to make a statement.”

Apparently, besides being able to indicate a right turn signal, orangutans use pantomime to communicate with human researchers, and also with other orangutans, expressing ideas like, “scratch me with this stick,” “eat this fruit,” and “wipe your dirty face off with this leaf.” Which is totally cool, as long as they don’t do the drawing-a-door-in-the-air-opening-it-and-stepping-through thing.