- This bonobo must’ve felt a bit like Alice at Mad Hatter’s tea party.
In a famous scene during her adventures in Wonderland, Alice attends the Mad Hatter’s mindboggling tea party. It’s one of the prime examples of the kind of surreal imagination that only humans are capable of.
Well, that’s what we thought. Now, researchers have found out that apes may have active imaginations, too — and they found that out with an Alice-esque tea party.
The star of the study was Kanzi, a bonobo who has demonstrated an astounding ability to understand human language and other abstract concepts. Considering his impressive mental capacities, scientists wanted to find out if Kanzi could play pretend.
Which is apparently what you do when you study apes.
To gauge Kanzi’s imagination, the researchers organized a pretend “tea party,” like little kids might do. They poured both real and imaginary drinks into little cups, while also placing invisible pretend snacks into jars.
Surprisingly, Kanzi played along, correctly choosing the dishes containing the pretend food most of the time. According to the researchers, this may indicate that there’s a spark of human-like imagination in ape minds.
On the other hand, some critics say Kanzi is already a genius in dealing with humans and that the results can’t be applied to all apes. We suppose there’s only one way to find out which is true — more tea parties!
Real Ape-bert Einstein
Before we get to the study, let’s meet its test subject — Kanzi. He’s a bonobo, a very close relative to humanity, and had a long history of wowing researchers with his smarts.
Kanzi was born in 1980 at Emory University’s primate research center in Georgia. Over his long life, he transferred between various research programs, displaying an uncanny ability to comprehend abstract concepts wherever he went.
The bonobo could understand human language very well and built an expansive vocabulary. Although he never learned the alphabet, he was able to associate symbols with words and communicate shockingly complex thoughts.
In addition, Kanzi could make primitive stone tools. Throughout his life, he was THE candidate for studying the development of language and tool use in apes, being about as intelligent as a young child.
As such, when researchers wanted to know if apes had imaginations and could play pretend, there was no one better to participate in their experiment that Kanzi.
Sadly, this proved to be Kanzi’s last test. Shortly after his pretend tea party, Kanzi passed away in September 2025 at the age of 44.
Pick a Cup, Any Cup
In his final service to science, Kanzi was sat in front of a table with a researcher. His human partner would place an empty pitcher on the table, together with two transparent cups (just so there wasn’t any question of Kanzi not being able to tell that there wasn’t actually anything in them).
The researcher pretended to pour a drink from the pitcher into both cups before “dumping” one of them back into the pitcher. Then, they’d as Kanzi which cup had juice in it.
Surprisingly consistently, the bonobo chose the “full” cup. In 68% of the trials, he correctly identified the cup that still had the imaginary liquid.
However, just to make sure that Kanzi was aware that the whole thing was pretend, the researchers repeated the same trial with actual juice. Once again, Kanzi picked the cup with real juice in 69% of the attempts.
The virtually identical results suggest that Kanzi was keeping up with the tea party, whether it was real or not.
But a good tea party has snacks to go with the drinks. So, the scientists repeated the experiment, but this time, they placed imaginary grapes into small jars.
Once again, Kanzi’s success rate in picking the jar with invisible grapes was 69%. In summary, he was able to play tea party pretty much as well as a human toddler, suggesting that he — and apes in general — may harbor active imaginations and the ability to play pretend.
Too Smart for Averages
However, not everybody is convinced by the results. Some biologists and other researchers have pointed out (rightfully so) that Kanzi is far from a regular bonobo.
He was born into a life of scientific experiments and has proven to be incredibly intelligent — likely much more so than your average Joe-nobo. It would be too hasty to claim that all bonobos and apes can play pretend as well as he did.
The researchers who organized Kanzi’s tea party agree. As such, they’re considering running a similar experiment with wild bonobos.
They just have to come up with a kind of tea party that doesn’t require verbal instruction. We’re sure the researchers will miss old, mild-mannered Kanzi once they start trying to herd wild apes to the tea table.