Who was Lucy The Human Chimp?
Sabrina Aulak
Updated: Apr 19 2021, 11:56 ET
Lucy the Human Chimp was a primate adopted by scientists at two days old and raised as a human child.
Learn about the tragic tale of the famous chimpanzee brought up as a human in a nature vs nurture experiment.
3
Who was Lucy The Human Chimp?
Lucy was born in 1964 in a small zoo in Florida.
Just two days after her birth, the chimpanzee was taken from her mother, who was sedated with a tranquillizer-laced cola.
The unsuspecting chimp was handed to scientist Maurice Temerlin and his wife, Jane, who raised the primate as their own daughter.
A stirring double portrait.
TWITTER
4/29/2021
Alex Parkinson s documentary is a first-person account of an extraordinary bond between a famous chimpanzee and the young caretaker who befriended her in the second half of her life.
There s no such thing as a human chimp, but half a century ago a chimpanzee s conditioning by her human parents famously blurred the lines. Lucy Temerlin lived in the suburbs with a psychologist and his wife, went for rides with them in the station wagon, and enjoyed the occasional gin and tonic. After a point, though that point being puberty she spent most of her time in a backyard chain-link cage because her size and aggressiveness were wreaking havoc on this nuclear family s domestic bliss.
Introduction
In trying to understand how aggression works, as well as aggressive emotions like anger, I decided to go to the animal literature. Human psychology research is all too prone to being determined by researchers’ preconceptions, and we all have a lot of firsthand experience and personal agendas when it comes to theorizing about human behavior. It’s easier to get some distance when thinking about animals; we have less stake in any particular theory of how animal emotions work. It’s also easier to set up experimental conditions with animals that would be hard to do ethically with humans, like keeping them in confinement and exposing them to stressors.