00:00For 30 years, science could not answer one question, what exactly was Oliver?
00:04In the 1960s, a baby chimpanzee was brought out of Africa.
00:08But he was different from every other chimp from the very start.
00:11He walked upright, on two legs. His head was smaller.
00:15His ears were strange. And his face, there was something unsettlingly human about it.
00:21Stranger still, the other chimpanzees refused to go near him.
00:24And he had no interest in them.
00:26He wanted to be with people, watching television, doing chores, even shaking hands.
00:31The whole scientific world studied him for three decades, and nobody could say what he was.
00:36Some suspected he wasn't a pure chimpanzee at all.
00:39Some went further, with a bold claim, that he might be a hybrid, half-human, half-ape.
00:44And that claim had one very persuasive number behind it.
00:4747. Humans have 46 chromosomes.
00:51Chimpanzees have 48.
00:53So a human-chimp child would carry exactly 47.
00:56There was even a precedent, horses have 64, donkeys 62, and their offspring, the mule, has exactly 63.
01:03So 47, attached to Oliver, seemed to seal the case.
01:07The number didn't even come from a scientist.
01:10Oliver had been living with a pair of animal trainers, who used him in stage shows.
01:14When he grew up, according to the trainers, he started showing interest in the wife,
01:18which made him, quite literally, a rival in the household.
01:21So they sold him.
01:22A New York lawyer named Michael Miller bought him, reportedly for $10,000, two new cars, in those days.
01:29Miller saw the opportunity instantly.
01:31This wasn't a chimp.
01:33This was a gold mine.
01:35He packaged Oliver as, the missing link, between man and ape.
01:39In 1976, he was presented to reporters in New York, standing upright, about the size of a fourth grader,
01:44weighing as much as an adult woman.
01:46And the official story?
01:47He had 47 chromosomes.
01:50He was flown to Japan for television.
01:52The promotion said he flew in a passenger cabin beside people.
01:56In truth, he was crammed into an ordinary animal crate in a cargo hold.
02:00And the man who explained Oliver's science on Japanese TV was a member of a Beatles tribute band.
02:05A tribute band member, teaching genetics.
02:08Oliver became a sensation.
02:09The image they sold was of a chimp who loved classical music, enjoyed cigars,
02:14drank coffee, and flew around the world.
02:16What they never mentioned, everywhere he went, someone held him on a leash.
02:20Fame has an expiration date.
02:22When the hype faded, Oliver was passed from one owner to the next,
02:25a theme park in California, Animal Training Centers.
02:28By 1989, he was sold to a Pennsylvania company that rented animals out for scientific experiments
02:33and cosmetics testing.
02:35Oliver was never used in experiments, perhaps because he looked too human,
02:39and the lab staff couldn't bring themselves to do it.
02:41But not being tested didn't mean a good life.
02:43His cage was a little over a meter long and barely half a meter wide.
02:47Roughly the size of your double bed.
02:49A grown chimpanzee, locked in a space the size of a bed, for years, some say seven, some say nine.
02:56Long enough for a child to be born and start school.
02:59Inside that cage, his muscles withered.
03:01His legs trembled.
03:03His eyesight failed.
03:05When he was finally released, he didn't have a single tooth left in his mouth.
03:09The star who once stood under spotlights, called a missing link,
03:12had become an old man who couldn't walk straight or see clearly.
03:15And it was during his darkest years that the great mystery was solved.
03:18In 1996, a geneticist at the University of Chicago finally ran a proper chromosome test.
03:24The result, 48.
03:26Exactly the standard chimpanzee count.
03:28Not one more, not one less.
03:31That answer seems almost cruel in its simplicity.
03:34But to hear that ordinary sentence, it cost Oliver his entire life.
03:38Later research examined his mitochondrial DNA, and the conclusion was even more specific,
03:42he was a common chimpanzee from Central Africa, his family likely from the Gabon region.
03:46His small head, odd ears, the gap in his face, experts confirmed they all fall within the normal
03:52range for ordinary chimpanzees.
03:54One anthropologist put it bluntly, Oliver was a standard model chimpanzee who simply liked to walk.
03:59So why the two extra chromosomes between us and chimps?
04:02Researchers found they weren't lost.
04:04They were joined.
04:06Human chromosome 2 is two ancestral chromosomes fused into one.
04:10Each parent gives one set, missing one, and together, that's two fewer.
04:14Our instruction manuals are nearly identical, were just found differently.
04:18So if he was a pure chimpanzee, how do we explain those early oddities?
04:22The likeliest answer isn't in his genes.
04:25It's in his childhood.
04:27Chimpanzees can stand and walk, they simply rarely choose to.
04:30But Oliver was taken from his family in Gabon as an infant and raised among humans.
04:35Humans fed him, taught him tasks, and clap every time he stood upright.
04:39Meanwhile, no one ever taught him the things a chimp is supposed to know,
04:42how to greet his own kind, how to groom, how to find his place in a group.
04:46So the other chimps avoided him, not because they sensed what he was,
04:49but because, in their eyes, he simply didn't speak chimpanzee.
04:53He wasn't half a person.
04:55He was just a chimpanzee who'd been raised by people, and never learned how to be a chimpanzee.
04:59In 1998, Oliver was finally sent to a sanctuary in Texas.
05:03The director later recalled the day they opened his cage.
05:07This old ape, nearly blind, toothless, riddled with arthritis,
05:10stood up on his own, and walked out on two legs.
05:13His last years were better.
05:15The sanctuary gave him a companion, a female chimp named Raisin.
05:19And when she noticed his eyesight was failing, another chimp, Sarah, would carry grapes to his hand.
05:24After a lifetime of being rejected, the ones who finally accepted him were chimpanzees.
05:29He loved coconut-flavored smoothies, one sip and he'd beam.
05:32Once, a staff member handed him sugar-free pistachio pudding.
05:36He took one taste, and threw the bowl right back.
05:39That part, honestly, was very human.
05:42In June 2012, staff found him on his favorite cot.
05:45He had passed away in his sleep.
05:48Raisin was beside him.
05:49He was at least 55 years old, remarkably long, for a chimpanzee.
05:54Just two days after he died, the sanctuary received an email.
05:58Someone wanted to buy his body, for genetic research.
06:01The sanctuary's answer was one sentence, over our dead bodies.
06:05Oliver was cremated, his ashes scattered across the sanctuary.
06:08In the end, the most haunting part of Oliver's story isn't about him at all.
06:12Human and chimpanzee DNA are like two instruction manuals, more than 98% identical.
06:17We are relatives.
06:19The line connecting us and the apes was never broken.
06:22It never needed a hybrid to prove it.
06:24But people wanted a half-human.
06:26When he looked human, they put him on stage and worshipped him.
06:29And when they decided he wasn't, they locked him in a cage the size of a bed, for years.
06:34For decades, everyone asked what Oliver was.
06:37Almost no one asked what he wanted.
06:39And what he wanted may have been simple all along.
06:42A cot.
06:43A coconut smoothie.
06:45Someone who loved to sleep beside him.
06:47And a group of his own kind, who finally let him come close.
06:51Thank you, Brian.
06:52We love you.
06:54Thank you, Brian.
06:58Thank you, Brian.
07:02Thank you so much.
07:05Thank you for your quick introduction and until now.
07:06Thank you, Brian.
07:07Ladies and adopted.
07:07Many academics.
07:08Cheers.
07:08Cheers.
07:08Cheers.
07:08Cheers.
