British film-maker James Marsh’s latest work, Project Nim, is about a 1970s experiment started in the heyday of the original "Planet of the Apes" films, a world where simians evolved and took over the planet.
Nim was a chimp raised as a human child in order to test out the hypothesis that man and his closest relative could learn to talk to each other. We learned more about human arrogance than simian intelligence, notes the Daily Mail.
A helpless pawn ripped — quite literally — from his mother’s breast, Nim was a victim of the naïve, hippy- culture-infused world of early-Seventies New York.Hippies can't catch a break these days, nor can social scientists. Hippy social scientists are double trouble but they dismiss their kookiness with a "Hey, it was the '70s" grin and think that is charming.
He fell into the clutches of a hapless band of woolly social scientists who gave him human clothes, human food and enough doting young lady volunteers to send his simian hormones haywire. If it were not for what happened later, it could have been a Woody Allen comedy.
Joyce Butler does sign language with Nim. Credit: Daily Mail
Instead of it being a careful experiment, his caretakers didn't take any notes and instead breastfed(!) him, give him alcohol and puffs of marijuana joints. And, errr, let him touch their naked body.
It only got worse as Nim became older, larger and more aggressive - including jumping 25 ft. from a balcony to attack even the woman he liked most. Harrowing stuff. And it only gets more tragic from there.
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