Linguistic, cultural and cognitive capacities of bonobos (Pan paniscus)

When human cultures merge, each takes on characteristics of the other and a completely new culture may emerge. Can a similar kind of phenomenon occur when the ways of being, doing, thinking, speaking and acting meld between two closely related hominid species, like Pan and Homo? We point to a new kind of group process, termed a Pan/Homo culture, and characterized by changes in the behavior of each species. A common emic perspective has developed between members of different species as they have come to share a common culture, but not a common biology. Their long-term shared experiences lend the force of credibility and meaningfulness to the communications regarding goals, plans and intentions. These expressions, inherently functional and meaningful within the joint subjective experiences of the members of the culture, nonetheless fail to meet standards of basic science, which demand detachment and disembodiment of communication. Because of this failure, accurate emic accounts of experiences within the culture are categorized as 'anecdotal'. By contrast, identical emic descriptions of experiences in 'human-only' cultures carry the force of law when given under oath. Accurate emic descriptions of communication processes-using examples of spontaneous Pan/Homo dialogues-are presented to reveal this bias. These dialogues illustrate the way in which empiricism acts to protect established modes of thought from new frameworks that pose a threat to its established interpretations of extant data. They also illustrate the cultural processes of shared knowledge, shared memory and joint subjective perceptions of reality that structure true symbolic communicative interchange and render it impervious to etic understanding.