 Well, my next guest is very much here with us, and she is the absolutely incredible Jilly Forrester. She's an expert in animal behavior, especially language, and she runs a project called The Great Ape Challenge. Hi, Jilly, welcome. Hi, Roma, thank you so much for having me. I think we are gonna start with this amazing contraption. I'm obsessed with gears and cogs, but I even have tattoos of gears on my arm. So what is this? So this is a puzzle that is actually part of a research project that looks at how we solve problems with our hands, not just us, but how we gained this capability over evolutionary time. So these puzzles have actually been used by gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans, and also us humans, also, you know, another Great Ape. Absolutely, and I think you have a nut for me, or you've got something installed for me. Would you like to have a go, Roma? I think I'm going to have to. Do you think you can beat our chimpanzee gorilla in orangutans times? Have they had a lot of practice? No, okay, let's have a go, let's have a go. Okay, so I'm gonna tell you the objective. This is one of our puzzles here. I'm gonna put this false nut in case you have an allergy, wouldn't want to have any issues here. In the top cog right there, can you see that? Yep. All you have to do is find a way to get this nut all the way through the box, out the bottom of the box, in your hand, as quickly as you can. Okay. Yeah? Okay. Does that sound good? Yeah. Do you think we should put that timer on? Yeah, let's do it. You ready? Yeah. You steady? Yeah, three, two, one, and go. All right, quick off the mark there. Ooh, straight through the double cogs, down to the flat maze, she's moving pretty quickly here. Oh, there's commentary. I don't know, I think she's on par with some of our faster apes. She's right out the side. Oh my gosh, this is a sterling effort. That was 17 seconds. I think that was at least, yeah, yeah. It was under 20. It was under 20 seconds for sure. That is amazing. That is, that's actually quite a lot faster than many of our great-aid cousins. But I think you maybe had a little bit of a coincidental positive moment at the bottom there. I'm not sure if you saw that if you'd gone the other way with the cogs here, you actually would have lost it in a trap and not been able to extract the net, which happens to many, many people often. And then you need to tilt the whole game sideways? Well, they lose it. And you know, if you, game over, game over. And the reason why we do this and have these different ways of solving the problem is that this puzzle actually is supposed to represent one of the components of our own human language. Okay, interesting. Right, so let us, should put that back on the table. Sure. And I've got lots and lots of questions for you. So you mentioned language, but this seems to be more of a kind of dexterity, spatial awareness type thing. So how does these two things relate? So it's a really good question. We don't think that we were always vocal language users. So if we look back in our kind of prehistory, pre-linguistic time, there must have been behaviors that helped us gain our vocal capabilities. And one of the things that we think was like a really good catalyst was solving problems with our hands. So using tools, making tools, preparing food, anything that requires you to put actions in the right order to get the right result out. Requires you to have effectively what we call syntax in language. So in syntax for words, if you put the words in the right order, you get the correct meaning out. And if you don't, you get a bunch of gibberish. So there's a bit of logic involved in this. You're kind of saying that the logic that we use to solve problems with our hands is similar logic that we're now applying to words. No, absolutely. And in fact, if you're assigning your language or speaking your language, it's the same bit of brain that's working. And we know from neuroscience studies that the bit of the brain that oversees our manual motor action behavior and our vocal behavior is actually highly overlapping. That's so fascinating. And this is the, I'm sorry, this is also true in our ape cousins. Well, this is why it's so interesting to look at them because we're trying to look for answers about how we became upright walking, talking, tool using great apes. And because none of our ancient ancestors are alive today for us to ask, and we can't dig up cognition because it doesn't fossilize, one of the opportunities to investigate who we were and how we came to be, who we are today, is to compare our behaviors to other apes. So if this does represent a syntax where you have to learn about how things work together, and the point of the box is that if you look at the different sections, there's a bit of the flat maze that you worked through. So that's kind of like a concrete noun. You always know where you are. You've got your finger on the net. And then you had cogs, which are kind of like verbs. You can not touch the nut, but you can move it through action. And then you had double cogs where you couldn't touch the nut. You couldn't touch the cog that the nut was in, but you could touch the cog that moved the cog that the nut was in. So there's an indirect link in some way. So there's this layer of abstraction where you have to understand how one thing modifies another, like an adjective modifies a noun. So if you don't understand those relationships, you can't solve the problem. And the goal was if we can create a physical syntax, which is actually how we think language might have started as gestures and motions that had these structures, if our great ape cousins can also solve those, then that might give us a clue as to how it originated for us. That's so fascinating. And then I understand that people have been trying to teach our cousins to speak or to communicate since the 1980s. So what does that look like? And how is that going? They weren't hugely successful. And I think a lot of the reason is that physiologically, we're quite different. We stand on two feet. It changed the way our spines are orientated and the way our necks sit on our spines. And that changed the whole kind of morphology of the mouth and the throat. And they can't really make the same sounds that we can. But likewise, I think it always made me think, why are we teaching them our language instead of learning how they're communicating? Cause that would be more interesting for us to understand who we are as humans today. And what's the ultimate goal of your research? So there are several. One is that we are also looking at children using these sorts of tools, these sorts of games and puzzles, because we know that the kinds of behaviors like those manual dexterity is exactly as you were saying. They come first in development and language follows after. I was thinking about my toddler. Like she very much like explored things with her hands, well, and mouth way before she ever started using language. Exactly. And so in that way, we think that what we know that if kids have good dexterity and they're solving problems well with their hands, they tend to go on to have typical language development. And when they don't, there can often be problems maybe with their language development. So trying to think about new interventions and new ways to screen children is a possibility for us now. Understanding our evolutionary path can help inform our developmental path. And so we're taking the research in that direction. We can kind of almost have an earlier intervention for a child that might need it and support them through that development. Exactly. That is the hope and that would be the path we like to travel. And where have you taken this box? I feel like they've been some interesting other players apart from me, obviously. Yeah. The boxes have been a massive hit. They were funded by the Lever Hume Trust a few years ago. We started with toddlers and looking at how they solve them and how that associates with their language learning. And alongside them, they were being solved by gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees in wild animal parks and zoos here. But they've also now traveled to Liberia, Cameroon, and Gabon being used across sanctuaries and release programs. Thank you so much, Julie. It's been absolutely brilliant having a chat to you.