00:00She was the gorilla who learned to speak. Then, just before she died, she signed something that
00:05made the whole world go quiet. Her name was Coco. Born in 1971 at the San Francisco Zoo,
00:11she was taken in by a Stanford graduate student and raised like a human child.
00:15And it worked, almost too well. Coco learned over a thousand signs.
00:20She could express emotions. She could tell jokes. She'd even turn her head away during a scary part
00:26of a movie. She had a pet kitten. When the kitten died, Coco signed, sad, over and over for days,
00:32making a low, aching sound that researchers said was almost identical to human crying.
00:36They tested her IQ. It came out between 70 and 90. But before she died, Coco signed one final
00:43message to humanity. And when it came out, it silenced everyone who saw it. So what exactly
00:48did she say? And how could a gorilla possibly understand death? Here's the message that went
00:53viral. It starts gentle. She says she loves humans, she loves the earth. Then the tone flips.
01:00She calls humans foolish, calls us destroyers. And she ends with a warning, nature is watching you.
01:06If a person had said that, it'd just be a slogan. But coming from the hands of a gorilla,
01:11it hit differently. It ran like a shiver down your spine. The video pulled in nearly 2 million views.
01:17Most people believe this was Coco's final message before she passed. But here's the truth,
01:22that statement was actually released in late 2015, two and a half years before she died.
01:27At the time, Paris was hosting the UN climate conference. A French environmental group invited
01:32Coco to act as a spokesperson for nature. Those lines. They were written for her in advance.
01:38A script. Coco could improvise a little, but some of the signs, like protection, like nature,
01:44she learned specifically for the shoot. The final video was edited together from several separate takes,
01:49stitched into one seamless message. And to help Coco understand the topic,
01:53the crew even showed her a National Geographic special literally called, Cool It. Think about that.
01:59Before the meeting, they handed their spokesperson a study guide. In plain terms,
02:04Coco was reading from a script and doing an ad. The foundation itself admitted it. It was the same
02:09process as hiring a celebrity for a commercial. So some people couldn't stay quiet. Anthropologists said,
02:15expecting a gorilla to grasp climate politics is basically impossible. You're just projecting
02:20human ideas onto an animal. Sign language experts said the whole presentation was oversimplified,
02:25misleading, even, and frankly disrespectful to real sign language. The truth is, scientists
02:30have argued about Coco for decades. The mainstream view now is this, Coco did learn many signs.
02:36She could tell people what she wanted. But whether she truly mastered language,
02:40whether she could build sentences the way a human does, the evidence just isn't there. And what Coco
02:46meant by her signs was mostly interpreted by the people closest to her. When she signed, sad,
02:51was she actually sad? Or just saying, too bad? Outsiders could never tell. It's a bit like putting
02:57subtitles on your cat, eventually you start writing the words you want to hear. But flip it around.
03:02To call Coco just a trained performer feels wrong too. Because there were things about her that nobody
03:08ever taught her. When Coco was seven, a teacher asked her three questions. First, when do gorillas die?
03:15Coco signed, trouble, then, old. Second, where do gorillas go after they die? She signed, comfortable,
03:22whole, goodbye. Third, what does it feel like to die? Happy? Sad? Afraid? Coco signed one word, sleep.
03:32That conversation was recorded by her caregiver, and what startled her most was the word, whole.
03:36Nobody had ever talked to Coco about burial. Nobody had shown her a funeral. Yet every single
03:42time death came up, she mentioned the hole. And it wasn't unique to her. At a zoo in Seattle,
03:48keepers watched a gorilla discover a dead rabbit in the enclosure. One of them walked over, dug a hole
03:53in the ground, placed the rabbit inside, and covered it. Nobody taught them. They just knew.
03:59There's another detail. Talk to Coco about death in general, and she'll engage. But ask whether she
04:05herself would die, or whether the people around her would, and she'd grow visibly uneasy. Sound familiar?
04:11Most of us can talk about someone else's death calmly. Turn it on ourselves, and something tightens.
04:17And to fear death, you first have to know there's a, you. Coco seemed to have that too. In a
04:22mirror test,
04:23researchers dabbed pink paint on her brow. The moment Coco saw her reflection, she reached up
04:28and wiped it away, over 40 times. Of the six gorillas tested before her, not one had passed.
04:34Someone once asked Coco, what is a smart gorilla? She signed one word, me. Honestly?
04:41She had a point. When her kitten died, she couldn't let it go. More than three months later,
04:46her caregiver asked how she felt. Coco signed, red, red, red, bad, sorry, Coco, love, good.
04:54Five years later, in 1990, a child, born the same day Coco was, found an old photo of Coco holding
05:00that kitten. Coco looked at it and signed, that bad, sorry, forget. Michael, her companion of over 20
05:07years, died in 2000. Coco reportedly didn't smile for half a year. It wasn't until the actor Robin
05:13Williams came to visit, tumbling around with her, that she finally laughed again. In 2014,
05:18Robin Williams died. When the Foundation told Coco, they say she grew sad. On the morning of June 19,
05:252018, Coco died in her sleep. She was 46. Wild gorillas usually lived to about 35.
05:32She'd had a long, full life. The Foundation said that Ndum, the male gorilla who'd lived beside her,
05:38was told the news. He signed two things, sad, and, I know. In the end, here's what makes Coco's story
05:45so
05:45strange. The one message humans most wanted to hear, that we'd been judged, condemned by nature,
05:50was a script we wrote ourselves and asked her to sign. We spent 40 years teaching her a thousand human
05:55signs. And even today, we still don't fully understand the signs that gorillas used long
06:00before we ever arrived. We spent four decades waiting for her to speak in our words. Almost no one thought
06:06to crouch down, and learn hers.
06:36And my son, how do you think that was a better term?
06:41And that was the worst. They were kind of a good thing.
06:41And that was the best reason we were being judged.
06:42Now, go to the eventually.
06:42And of course, I'm sure we're an old man who's happy.
06:42How are we doing?
06:42It's not a great day.
06:42I'm sure I'm kind of a good thing.
06:42I'm sure.
06:42I'm a good thing.
06:43I'm sure we're being judged on that.
06:43I'm you, I'm good to check.
06:43You, I'm good.
