M’Pungu between Charles Darwin and Wolfgang Köhler: the changing human perceptions of great apes

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article, a contribution to the growing field of animal-human history, traces scientific understanding of the great apes over the course of two centuries, with an emphasis on the period from 1850 to 1920. It sets the changing perceptions of apes within the context of intellectual developments, including the revolution sparked by Darwin and continued by a number of lesser-known scientists who studied apes. The important economic and societal advances required to arrange for the transportation of apes from Africa to Europe and their subsequent captivity there are also discussed. The path-breaking studies of apes by the German behavioral scientist Wolfgang Köhler in the 1910s, which laid the foundation for the work of later scientists like Jane Goodall, were based on a gradual shift in the perception of animal intelligence in the broader scientific world, followed by nearly a century of German primate research, observations of gorillas in Germany’s sophisticated zoos, and public funding for the study of primates.