These things always make me tired.
71 hours of interaction. Not just 71 hours. 71 hours that were chosen because of the context. After decades of training.
Decades ago Koko was claimed to have demonstrated a lot of linguistic behavior. This was huge. Somebody (now dead) went and examined the raw footage.
Some of the original behavior was random but suited to the context. Koko had mixed and matched signs and symbols all over the place. Those that fit the researchers' needs were data; those that didn't--the vast majority--weren't data. At some point in the presence of a banana Koko strung together signs that could have meaning.
Some of the linguistic data was contradictory. Word order is often syntax. Koko had no word order. The researchers picked sets of signs that "displayed" word order.
And if Koko signed something that was present in the environment, it was evidence that she understood signified/signifier relations. If she signed something not present, it was a request for that thing. Thing is, videos made without her awareness showed her signing the same kinds of things randomly. What meant "Koko wants a banana" occurred as much in the absence of a banana as it did just before she reached for another fruit or water or a toy, or picked up a toy and threw it away.
Some of the linguistic data was mimicry. Cut out the 5 minutes before Koko makes a gesture and suddenly it becomes original.
The original claims were utterly demolished.
Around the same time, Noam Chomsky famously pointed out that finding a species of primates that were able to speak but hadn't was like finding "an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for humans to teach them to fly."
The evolutionist in me suspects that language among primates would show a continuum. Perhaps one with large gaps because of the nature of this kind of emergent property. But finding other primates set up for language now is highly, highly implausible. It's like finding a transitional dialect between Indo-European and Dravidian. Assuming one existed 5000 BC, language spread and death would have wiped out all the interposed dialects. Both Dravidian and IE spread to their borders.
Even so, H. sapiens was very good at wiping out competing primate species. It's what successful species do--if they can spread, by definition being successful means winning over competition in a particular ecological niche. Except that humans have a rather broad niche.
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