The #1 source for news about monkeys and apes

[Carrie McLaren <carrie AT stayfreemagazine.org>]

BusinessWorld
Keeli & Ivy: Chimps Like Us (Discovery Channel)
Aug 21 2002, 8:00 PM, Aug 21 2002 11:00 PM ,  Aug 24 2002 , 1:00 PM
http://dsc.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp?episode=21413000

Chimps' quest for learning documented on television

Meet Keeli and Ivy. They're typical toddlers - mugging for the 
camera, begging for sweets, throwing tantrums and horsing around. 
They're learning their ABCs, and they're extra excited on holidays, 
they have a hard time sitting still and they just love the 
playground. However, a small but critically important one percent 
genetic difference makes Keeli and Ivy chimpanzees, not humans. Yet, 
because they're so close to humans on the evolutionary tree, 
scientists are working with chimps to learn if they can think like 
humans and, more remarkably, use language. For the past four years, 
Animal Planet's cameras have recorded scientific history in the 
making, and the results are now ready for view. Keeli & Ivy: Chimps 
Like Us follows psychology professor Sally Boysen and her graduate 
students at The Ohio State University Chimpanzee Center, where they 
care for 11 chimpanzees and four capuchin monkeys as if they are 
their own children. The chimps, who can live up to 60 years of age in 
captivity, enjoy socializing and learning with the help of the 
pioneering center staff.

Keeli & Ivy: Chimps Like Us premieres Aug. 17, 6:30 p.m. (replay on 
Aug. 18, 12:30 a.m.) as part of the special programming event "Chimps 
Like Us." Also part of "Chimps Like Us" are Fifi's Boys - A Story of 
Wild Chimpanzees, a program that follows the most successful mother 
chimp Jane Goodall worked with in Tanzania, at 7:30 p.m. and An 
Animal's World: Chimps, a fascinating look at the analytical side of 
human's closest relatives, at 8:30 p.m.

Keeli & Ivy: Chimps Like Us introduces viewers to an 18-month-old 
male chimp named Keeli and a one-year-old female named Ivy, as Ms. 
Boysen and her assistants painstakingly teach the chimps how to 
respond to, and use, graphic symbols in sequence - similar to how 
human children learn to read and spell. Over the next four years, 
Keeli and Ivy are slowly brought along in their studies. At the 
beginning, they learn to press the letters A, B, C and more in 
sequence on a touch-screen computer monitor.

The camera's lens, coming back every few months, year after year, 
until Keeli and Ivy are six years old and fully integrated into the 
center's adult chimp community, reveals their educational programs as 
well as their personality differences.

--
Carrie McLaren
Editor, Stay Free!
718.398.9324
www.stayfreemagazine.org
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