World Orangutan Day highlights the conservation of orangutans, focusing on threats like habitat destruction.
Charles Darwin's encounters with an orangutan named Jenny in 1838 played a crucial role in shaping his evolutionary theories.
Observing Jenny's human-like emotions and behaviors, Darwin proposed that humans and apes share common ancestors, a theory that remains debated today.
August 19 marks World Orangutan Day every year. The day focuses on the conservation of orangutans and their natural habitat, raising awareness about the threats they face, such as habitat destruction and the illegal pet trade.
According to the Orangutan Conservancy, the word orangutan comes from the Malay words “Orang,” meaning person, and “Hutan,” meaning of the forest. Thus, the word “Orangutan,” quite literally translates to “person of the forest.”
These Asian great apes are today found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. While the former is ruled wholly by Indonesia, Borneo is divided into sections ruled by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
Today, there are three separate recognised types of orangutans: Sumatran (Pongo abelii), Bornean (Pongo pygmaeus) and the newly classified Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis).
Orangutans are our closest living relatives after chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), bonobos (Pan paniscus) and gorillas (Gorilla beringei and Gorilla gorilla), sharing 97 per cent of their DNA with us.
Even more importantly, these primates played a pivotal role in shaping the ideas of Victorian scientists, including Charles Darwin, about evolution and humanity’s origins.
In Darwin’s case, it all started when he met a female orangutan called Jenny.
John van Wyhe and Peter C Kjærgaard describe in their 2015 paper, Going the whole orang: Darwin, Wallace and the natural history of orangutans, the circumstances that led to the meeting between Darwin and Jenny.
“In 1838 Charles Darwin was back in London, after the voyage of the Beagle, working on his collections and starting to develop his theory of transmutation or evolution. He had become a corresponding member in 1831 so he was free to visit the Zoological Society’s Gardens and experiment with the animals,” van Wyhe and Kjærgaard write in the paper published in the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
It was in late March of that year that Darwin visited the Zoo. He described what happened in a letter to his sister, Susan. The excerpt below is on from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s portal:
The keeper showed her an apple, but would not give it her, whereupon she threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child.— She then looked very sulky & after two or three fits of pashion, the keeper said, “Jenny if you will stop bawling & be a good girl, I will give you the apple.— She certainly understood every word of this, &, though like a child, she had great work to stop whining, she at last succeeded, & then got the apple, with which she jumped into an arm chair & began eating it, with the most contented countenance imaginable.
Darwin carefully observed Jenny and her moves in the March and subsequent visits. “He made notes based on these visits in his transmutation notebooks and in a previously unpublished document now in the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library (DAR 191),” write van Wyhe and Kjærgaard.
Darwin found Jenny to be displaying qualities similar to a human being. She exhibited jealousy and a range of other emotions, could use tools and seemed to understand human language, doing what she was told.
“The DAR 191 notes reveal that Darwin saw the orangutans more than anything as “like a child”. This suggests that they were rudimentally human,” the paper reads.
Van Wyhe and Kjærgaard add that, “These notes make clear that Darwin’s observations were aimed particularly at recording evidence that purportedly human behaviours and emotions were present in apes which he took to be our actual relatives, though not direct ancestors. This would allow him to argue that the difference between humans and animals was one of degree, not of kind. Difference by degree could be explained by his nascent theory of branching evolutionary descent. Therefore, human beings were descended from earlier apes. Anatomy alone already suggested some form of relationship. But far more specific and chilling details were evident in their emotions and behaviour.”
Around April 1838, Darwin made an important observation, as the ZSL notes:
Let man visit Ouranoutang in domestication, hear expressive whine, see its intelligence when spoken [to]; as if it understands every word said - see its affection. - to those it knew. - see its passion & rage, sulkiness, & very actions of despair; ... and then let him boast of his proud preeminence ... Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.
Ultimately, write van Wyhe and Kjærgaard, Darwin’s observations on orangutans were published in his books The descent of man (1871) and especially in the Expression of the emotions (1872).
A series of encounters that he had with Jenny thus finally led Darwin to extrapolate the hypothesis that would make him famous and controversial at the same time: humans, monkeys and apes shared common ancestors.
The debate between those who adhere to this theory and those who believe in creationism, or that humans have been created by divine design, continues to rage to this day.