Ai, a female chimpanzee internationally known for her extraordinary cognitive abilities, has died at the age of 49, according to the Center for the Evolutionary
Origins of Human Behavior in Japan. The institute said Ai died on 9 January due to old age and multiple organ failure, and that she was surrounded by staff at the time of her death. Researchers described Ai as a pioneering figure in studies of primate intelligence, whose participation in decades of research helped shape scientific understanding of perception, learning and memory in chimpanzees. Her work formed the backbone of the renowned Ai Project, a long-running research programme focused on exploring the “chimpanzee mind.” Ai was born in western Africa and arrived in Japan in 1977, where she lived at Kyoto University. Over the years, her remarkable abilities earned her the nickname “genius” in popular media and made her the subject of numerous academic papers and documentaries.
Who Was Chimpanzee Ai?
Ai became famous for her ability to use numbers, recognise colours, and identify symbols with exceptional accuracy. Researchers provided her with a special keyboard connected to a computer when she was just 18 months old, allowing them to study her learning and memory.
By the age of five, she had mastered numerical naming from one to six and could identify the number, colour and object of hundreds of different samples, according to a 1985 scientific paper by primatologist Tetsuro Matsuzawa. Ai could recognise more than 100 Chinese characters, the English alphabet, Arabic numerals from zero to nine, and 11 different colours.
In one study, she correctly matched the Chinese character for pink with a pink square displayed on a computer screen. In another experiment, she recreated a “virtual apple” by selecting shapes on a screen to represent the fruit.
Ai was also known for her love of drawing and painting, often scribbling with marker pens without the need for food rewards. One of her paintings was even used to make a scarf that was gifted in 2017 to renowned primatologist Jane Goodall during the 40th anniversary of the Ai Project.
In 2000, Ai also became a mother, giving birth to a son named Ayumu, who went on to become well-known for his own exceptional memory abilities and contributed to research on the transfer of knowledge between parents and children. Ai famously broke out of her cage by using a key to unlock it, according to Japanese media.
