Enter the Kingdom of the Great Apes with National Geographic

I'm Cheryl Knott, a National Geographic Explorer. And I'm Tim Laman, a National Geographic Explorer and photographer. In celebration of the new movie Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, we're here to talk about the incredible species that make up the great apes. We're joined by Jodi Carrigan, Curator of Primates at Zoo Atlanta.

We’ve got one of the largest ape populations in North America. And we're sitting right in front of the African rainforest where we have 21 western lowland gorillas. Great apes are closely related to humans. We evolved from a common ancestor a few million years ago. Not everybody maybe knows what species are included in the great apes. The great apes are primates like us. There are four other living great apes right now: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans.

They're highly intelligent. They have complex social relationships. One reason that people find such a connection is they're just so similar to us. I got a really close-up photograph of an orangutan’s hand one time. And he was just holding a branch. And I just saw the fingerprints were just so similar, like a human hand. That just kind of hit me like, wow, that was so much like us.

I remember the first time I was following wild orangutans; he woke up and he looked over at me from his nest, and I looked into his eyes and you could just see that there was intelligence behind those eyes. And it makes you feel this connection with them. Their emotions resemble so much of human emotions. They're a highly social species, except for orangutans in the wild.

Can you tell some of the stories you've seen about emotion in great apes? The most obvious one that comes to mind is fear or anger. Doing vocalizations that sort of show their fear and their anxiety. Grief is another one. It’s been shown that they have that mourning behavior where an individual passes in the family; they have that cry vocalization for gorillas.

They also, in the movie, portray the apes doing a lot of nonverbal communication. Particularly for gorillas and, of course, chimpanzees, and I'm sure you've got it for the orangutans. We see a lot of play faces. And then it’s usually associated with a smile and a laugh. Even the fear grimace. And then, of course, that's just facial expressions. But their body gestures are really important.

Chest beats for a gorilla could mean play. But it also has a different context where it could mean being a little bit more aggressive. All of it is part of their communication. So before we had spoken language, we may have been using gestures. That's one of the theories about how language evolved. We kind of see the beginning of language in the great apes today.

One of the fascinating things about the orangutans - in different populations around different parts of Borneo or Sumatra, they have different learned behaviors. So every population is not identical. Just like in human populations around the world, we all have different customs. Over the last, you know, 30 or so years we've really found how they do have these cultural differences that are passed on.

I got to photograph a few times in different parts of Borneo. One of the communications that orangutans use when they feel threatened, they'll do a vocalization called a kiss squeak, where they make a loud kissing, smacking sound. Sometimes they do it on their hand. But in just some areas of Borneo, they grab a handful of leaves, and then they kiss squeak onto the handful of leaves. And then they throw the leaves down. But in other parts of Borneo, you never see them doing that.

It also, I think, brings up the need to conserve all these populations. You can't just protect one population of gorillas and one population of chimpanzees. They all are unique and have this learned behavior they're passing on. Hopefully, the Planet of the Apes movie will get people interested in the great apes. And maybe they'll go off and want to learn a bit more about them.

We're the dominant species. We have some responsibility here to look after the other great apes. All the apes are either critically endangered or endangered. Extinction is forever. Endangered means there's still time. The things that make them so similar to humans that make us so interested in them are also those reasons why we need to protect them.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is now playing only in theaters.