“At times, as I watch [bonobos], I seem to be staring into my own distant past and seeing in front of me “quasi persons” – not people, but “near people.” The feeling is as though, in an eerie and inexplicable way, I am watching a species that is not the same as me yet is connected to me – is part of me. Even after many years of watching and studying bonobos, I still cannot help but sense that I am in the presence of the emergence of the human mind, the dawn of our peculiarly human perspective and feeling.”

— Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind