Radick 2005

Journal of the History of Biology (2005) 38: 461–493 Ó Springer 2005
DOI 10.1007/s10739-005-0554-z
Primate Language and the Playback Experiment, in 1890 and 1980
GREGORY RADICK
Division of History and Philosophy of Science
School of Philosophy
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
E-mail: G.M.Radick@leeds.ac.uk
Abstract. The playback experiment – the playing back of recorded animal sounds to
the animals in order to observe their responses – has twice become central to celebrated
researches on non-human primates. First, in the years around 1890, Richard Garner, an
amateur scientist and evolutionary enthusiast, used the new wax cylinder phonograph to
record and reproduce monkey utterances with the aim of translating them. Second, in
the years around 1980, the ethologists Peter Marler, Robert Seyfarth, and Dorothy
Cheney used tape recorders in a broadly similar way to test whether the different
predator calls of one monkey species, vervet monkeys, warn about different kinds of
predator. This paper explores the circumstances leading to the ca. 1890 invention and
the ca. 1980 reinvention of the primate playback experiment. In both instances, I show,
the experiment served as a riposte to those arguing, on scientific grounds, that an
unbridgeable gap divides human language from animal communication. I also consider
how far progress in technology explains the timing of invention and reinvention. I
conclude with some reflections on sifting contingent from inevitable aspects of the
history of the primate playback experiment, and of scientific achievements more
generally.
Keywords: animal communication, ethology, evolution of language, Garner, Richard,

historical contingency, Marler, Peter, philology, psychology, playback experiments,
technological determinism
The Two Lives of an Experiment
In September 1890, a St. Louis newspaper reported the debut of a new

kind of experiment. It took place in Washington, D. C., in the zoo-
logical garden then under construction behind the Smithsonian build-
ing. Near the monkey cage, a ‘‘group of eminent doctors and
professors,’’ about a dozen, including the Secretary, had gathered to
observe a test of whether monkeys talk. In charge was Richard L.
Garner, ‘‘Prof. Garner,’’ one of the Smithsonian’s ‘‘honorary curators.’’
462 GREGORY RADICK
Garner had with him a graphophone – a version of the phonograph –

and had inserted its large tin horn through the cage door. As the learned
company watched attentively, ‘‘Prof. Garner ground away at the hand-
graphophone with its crank attachment,’’ while ‘‘the Keeper of the
animals poked the monkeys up with a stick to make them talk.’’ The
cage held two monkeys, one wild and one tame. The wild monkey kept
quiet, apart from the occasional enraged scream. The tame one ‘‘did
nothing but chatter and gibber most unintelligibly, as it seemed to the
rest of the audience; but Prof. Garner was inclined to think that this was
really conversation worth taking down,’’ and proceeded to fill six wax
cylinders with recorded monkey utterances. These records were the
means to a novel scientific end:
Prof. Garner was very far from imagining that he would be able to
understand this monkey-talk when repeated to him by the machine.
But his notion was to record the remarks of one monkey and grind
them out through the horn for the benefit of the other monkey, so
as to observe what sort of responses the second one would make.
By comparing the original observations and the replies, he hoped to
get some few clews [sic] that would eventually enable him to
translate the monkey language.1
Garner’s phonographic experiments with Stateside simians between
1890 and 1892 became the starting point for research that would make
him one of the best-known scientific men of his day. The popular press
could not get enough of ‘‘the monkey man,’’ especially, from 1891, his
plan to take a phonograph to the African jungle, install the machine and
himself in a metal cage, and set to work on the utterances of wild gorillas
and chimpanzees.2 Years after his death in 1920, journalists could count
on readers knowing who Garner was and what he was famous for.3
Among philologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, meanwhile,
Garner was acknowledged as a pioneering student of primate commu-
nication and the inventor of a promising new method for its study. The
philologist E. P. Evans, for instance, reckoned the phonograph a
‘‘scientific weapon of phonetic precision’’ which, in Garner’s hands, had
eliminated the need to rely on paltry human powers to imitate and desc-
ribe simian sounds. Evans foresaw the phonograph doing for philology
1
‘‘Can Monkeys Talk?,’’ 1890. I am grateful to Pamela Henson of the Smithsonian
Institution Archives for sending me this article.
2
On Garner’s life and work up to the time of his first trip to Africa, see Radick,
2003a.
3
See, e.g., the 1924 newspaper article reproduced in Haraway, 1989, p. 20.
PRIMATE LANGUAGE AND THE PLAYBACK EXPERIMENT 463
what the microscope had done for medicine.4 Reviewing Garner’s 1892
book The Speech of Monkeys, Joseph Jastrow, founder of the new psy-
chological laboratory at Madison, congratulated Garner on ‘‘the happy
idea of studying the chatterings of monkeys by recording them in a
phonograph, reproducing [these sounds] before other monkeys and
recording the effect produced upon them by the sounds.’’5 No less than
William James and Wilhelm Wundt, the dominant psychologists of the
era, took notice. James annotated his copy of his Principles of Psychol-
ogy (1890) with a reference to Garner’s first article on the ‘‘simian ton-
gue,’’ whose words differed only in degree from human words, thus
representing ‘‘the rudiments from which the tongues of mankind could
easily develop.’’6 Some years later, when an American student in Ger-
many, John P. Harrington, asked Wundt if apes have language, Wundt
directed the young man to Garner’s work. Harrington later used the
phonograph extensively in legendary field studies of American Indian
languages – studies, as he saw it, inspired by Garner’s example.7
But fame is famously fickle. By the mid-twentieth century, Garner’s
had largely deserted him. When his name surfaces now, it tends to be
in connection with one of three things: his use of a cage to observe apes
(taken up by a character in a minor Jules Verne novel, The Village in
the Treetops); his claim to have successfully taught a few words to a
young chimpanzee while in the Congo; and his invention of what are
now called playback experiments, or playbacks.8 The experiment
4
Evans, 1893, quotation on p. 438, and Evans, 1897, p. 315.
5
Jastrow, 1892, p. 215, reviewing Garner, 1892a. Reviews also appeared in Nature,
Science, Popular Science Monthly, the New York Times and the London Times, among
other places. See Radick, 2003a, pp. 187, 203–204 (fn. 59).
6
James’s note on Garner is reprinted in James, 1981, vol. 10, p. 1470. The quotation is
from Garner, 1891, p. 314 (page reference is to the 1996 reprint).
7
See the 10 March 1937 letter from Harrington to Garner’s son Harry, in the Papers of
John Peabody Harrington (microfilm version), vol. 9, reel 013, frames 0043ff. Both the
originals and a microfilm set are held at the National Anthropological Archives,
Smithsonian, Washington, D. C.
8
For Garner and his cage, see, e.g., Lemmon, 1994, p. 9. For Garner as English-
language tutor for a chimpanzee, Moses, see, e.g., Raby, 1996, p. 192. For Garner as
playback pioneer, see Falls, 1992, p. 21; also Owings and Morton, 1998, p. 35. The
Verne novel features a German doctor, Johausen, who sets off into the jungle with a
cage to complete the research into monkey language left unfinished by Garner. See
Verne, 1901. In Adrian Desmond’s book on the ape language controversies of the 1970s,
he depicted Garner in his cage in 1892–3 as ‘‘like some zoological specimen marked
‘Victorian Homo sapiens,’ recording on the latest wax-cylinder phonograph the bewil-
dered reactions of a wealth of animals (including gorillas) who trooped up to inspect
him’’ (Desmond, 1979, p. 254, n. 3). In fact Garner never managed to get a working
phonograph in Africa on that first expedition. See Radick, 2000b, pp. 166–168.
464 GREGORY RADICK
inaugurated at the Smithsonian in 1890 is now a commonplace in the

study of animal communication. It is, in essence, as simple as described
in the newspaper report above: record the sounds of the animals under
study, then play the recordings back to the animals and observe their
responses. Strikingly, after the initial rise to prominence with Garner,
the experiment virtually disappeared from the scientific repertoire.
Throughout the early twentieth century, there are only scattered in-
stances, of little impact. Playbacks began to be performed again in a
sustained way only in the late 1940s and 1950s, when they were used
mainly in studies of fish, insects, amphibians, and especially birds.9
The technique did not become the pivot of an admired research pro-
gram in primate communication again until the late-1970s. Once
again, however, media interest was intense. ‘‘Studies in Africa Find
Monkeys Using Rudimentary ‘Language’’’ was how the New York
Times headlined the report on its front page one morning in November
1980.
According to the Times, two ethologists at Rockefeller University,
Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, together with their postdoctoral
supervisor Peter Marler, had completed a series of playback experi-
ments with vervet monkeys at a national park in Kenya. These mon-
keys, it was explained, were known to produce different vocalizations in
response to sightings of three different predators: leopards, eagles, and
pythons. On hearing these different alarm calls, furthermore, the vervets
responded as if informed about which predator needed escaping: run-
ning up a tree at the leopard alarm; running into the bushes at the eagle
alarm; scrutinizing the ground at the python alarm. Through the use of
playbacks, Cheney, Seyfarth, and Marler claimed to have found, in the
reporter’s words, ‘‘strong evidence that the monkeys respond not just to
the urgency of the calls but to the semantic content as well, specifying
different categories of animals or types of danger.’’ The vervet predator
calls thus seemed to be ‘‘elements of a rudimentary language’’ – a
conclusion the researchers expected to be controversial, since, the dance
language of the bees excepted, the ‘‘ability to convey messages that carry
such specific information content has always been considered a distin-
guishing feature of human speech.’’10
9
On the history of playbacks, see Falls, 1992. Falls does not mention the twentieth-
century primate playbacks, discussed below, of Ditmars, Koch, and Carpenter. On
Wenner’s playbacks with bees in the 1960s, see Tania Munz’s contribution to this issue.
10
Schmeck, 1980. The work reported here was published in Seyfarth et al., 1980a and
1980b; and Seyfarth and Cheney, 1980. I cannot resist pointing out that Garner too
made the front page of the New York Times, on his return to the States from his first
African trip; ‘‘Thinks Well. . .,’’ 1894.
Since 1980, there have been countless playback experiments with

non-human primates, in laboratories and in the field. The primate
playback has stabilized into an off-the-shelf resource, susceptible of
endless variation. The facts about vervet predator calls, meanwhile,
have stabilized into factoids. People who know almost nothing else
about monkeys will often have heard about the ones with ‘‘words’’ for
leopard, eagle, and python. It can now be learned from the inside of
soft-drink bottle caps, or from television, where footage of Cheney and
Seyfarth in the field has become a staple of natural history program-
ming. For these junior members of the Rockefeller group, the predator
call playbacks served as a point of entry into a decade-long enquiry into
vervet social lives and social intelligence. Thanks in part to the advocacy
of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the vervet research became widely
known as a shining example both of the new ‘‘cognitive ethology’’ and
of the traditional virtues of assumptions of design in nature.11 Cheney
and Seyfarth’s farewell to the vervets, How Monkeys See the World
(1990), has the status of a classic.12 Over the last quarter century, serious
thinkers on the evolutionary origins of language – a topic with a
notoriously thin empirical base – have needed to confront the vervet
alarm call experiments and their interpretation.13
The three members of the Rockefeller group were not at all conscious
of following in the footsteps of Garner. He was unknown to Seyfarth
and Cheney, and little more than a dim and superseded historical figure
to Marler. The story of the primate playback experiment is thus one of
invention and reinvention. It is, at the same time, one of asking and
re-asking, for the playback technique enacted a question: what will
experiment reveal about the meaning of primate vocalizations for the
primates themselves? The aim in what follows is to examine the con-
ditions under which this question came to be asked, and under which
playbacks emerged as an attractive answer, first in the years around
1890, and then in the years around 1980. At the end, I will suggest some
general conclusions about the sciences and their histories. At the outset,
however, I shall consider something much more straightforward:
that the primate playback experiment kept to a schedule dictated by
technology.
11
Dennett, 1983. On this paper’s impact, see Seyfarth and Cheney, 2002.
12
Cheney and Seyfarth, 1990.
13
See, e.g., Bickerton, 1990, pp. 10–16; Pinker, 1994, pp. 351–352; Deacon, 1997, pp.
54–68; Dunbar, 1996, pp. 21–22, 46–51, 140–142; and Diamond, 1991, pp. 125–149, esp.
127–137. Jared Diamond in particular (pp. 126–127) emphasizes how crucial the vervet
playback experiments are in modern theorizing about language origins.
466 GREGORY RADICK
Tools and Timing
‘‘Technological determinism’’ is, like ‘‘social Darwinism,’’ a term of

abuse. It is something coarse that one hopes not to be accused of.
Nothing is less surprising, therefore, than a historian denying that
technologies or applications of them were inevitable.14 On the whole,
what follows will be, on this point, impeccably orthodox. We will see
how much needed to be in place for playback experiments with primates
to seem worth doing, and worth finding out about, beyond the mere
availability of suitable recording devices. Still, when we ask why Gar-
ner’s experiments happened when they did, we should not miss the
obvious: that before the end of the nineteenth century, there was no
such thing as recording technology.
The first phonograph dates from 1877. There were, of course,
precedents, more or less obscure. But Edison’s invention of the tinfoil
phonograph marked the entry into public consciousness of machines
that could preserve and reproduce sound. The early phonographs daz-
zled more by their promise than achievement; we still speak disparag-
ingly of ‘‘tinny’’ recordings. And indeed progress, after a decade-long
hiatus, was rapid. In 1887, Bell introduced the graphophone, whose
wax-covered cylinders furnished higher fidelity and more durable
recordings. Edison followed in 1888 with a wax-cylinder device of his
own, the ‘‘Perfected Phonograph,’’ powered not by hand-cranking but
by electricity from his firm’s batteries. A mere two years later, Garner
was using the improved machine – he used both graphophones and
phonographs – in playback experiments with monkeys at the zoological
garden in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. It appears, then, that a
decent short answer to the question, ‘‘why 1890 for the first primate
playbacks?,’’ is: ‘‘because the technology did not permit it much before
that time.’’ No sooner had a machine capable of playbacks come along
than someone used it for that purpose. Not just anyone, moreover, but a
citizen of a country where graphophones and phonographs were better
distributed than anywhere else in the world, indeed in a city where, on
one estimate, recording technology enjoyed a public presence without
parallel.15
14
For a lively collection of essays on technological determinism, see Smith and Marx,
1994.
15
On the early history of the phonograph, see, e.g., Israel, 1998, pp. 142–156 and 277–
291; Gelatt, 1977, chs. 1 and 2. On the phonograph’s comparative success in Wash-
ington, D.C., see ‘‘The Columbia Phonograph Co.,’’ (1891). A superb cultural history of
sound recording technologies in the United States is Morton, 2000.
Undoubtedly, the belated improvements in the phonograph’s design

and distribution are part of the explanation for Garner’s use of it in his
experimental studies from 1890 onwards. But they are only a part. Just
as important, as we shall see, was Garner’s immersion in the debates
over Darwinism in his day. Although not trained in the sciences,
Garner was familiar with elite controversies over language and evolu-
tion, and eager for the victory of the evolutionists. What he later
remembered as a defining event was a debate that broke out among his
fellow schoolteachers one day. The topic was phonetics, then a new
enthusiasm, widely held to be the key to more effective teaching of
reading and writing. In the course of the meeting, Garner volunteered
that animals, too, had language, but to a lesser degree than humans
had. The other teachers shouted him down so vociferously, as he
recalled, that it resolved him to action. It was then that his enquiries
among the monkeys began.16 Throughout the 1880s, he made attempts
at translation, but found these frustrating. It was just too hard: too
hard to remember what the animal’s utterances sounded like; to devise
a notation that truly represented the utterances; to hear exactly what
was uttered; to imitate the utterances back to the animals with preci-
sion.17 It was this prior history of failure in research into the animal
roots of language that enabled Garner to see in the improved phono-
graph what no-one else saw: a means for vindicating the Darwinian
theory. As he was reported as saying in an interview, ‘‘At last came the
Edison phonograph. I was being shipwrecked, when this wonderful
machine saved me.’’18
So technological determinism falls short for 1890. What of 1980? One
admirer of the vervet experiments, the evolutionary biogeographer
Jared Diamond, has glossed them in determinist fashion. According to
Diamond, ‘‘the recognition of vervet language was long delayed because
vervets are much better tuned to the distinctions among their grunts
than we are. To decode their grunts required tape recorder playback
experiments, facilitated by the open habitat and small territories in
which vervets live.’’19 It is relatively easy to decide whether the trans-
lation of vervetese depended on tape recorders available only from the
mid- to late-1970s. Much of the vervet lexicon, including the predator
16
On the discussion at the Teachers’ Institute, see R. L. Garner, ‘‘The Speech of
Animals,’’ unpublished ms, in the Papers of R. L. Garner, Box 6, Folder: ‘‘Writings:
‘Sanctuary to Women’ – ‘Spider Webs,’’’ National Anthropological Archives, Smith-
sonian.
17
See Garner, 1891, p. 315.
18
Quotation from Phillips, 1891.
19
Diamond, 1995, p. 50.
468 GREGORY RADICK
alarm calls, was first decoded without the use of playbacks, in the course
of non-experimental fieldwork in the 1960s by Marler’s student Thomas
Struhsaker. I will come back to Struhsaker’s contribution below.20
Harder to judge is a different but related possibility: that, once modern
‘‘bioacoustics’’ was underway, it was only a matter of time before
someone got around to applying its armamentarium, playbacks
included, to non-human primates. A number of scientific authors
emphasize how important was the arrival in the late 1940s of portable
tape recorders and, just as crucially, sound spectrographs, which
visualize the patterns of frequencies and intensities in complex sounds.
The first twentieth-century playbacks of note occurred at around this
time.21
There is no denying the energizing effect of these innovations. On the
other hand, Garner’s precedent alerts us to the availability of the means
for doing playbacks well before mid-century.22 From around 1900, the
most popular devices were, it is true, reproduction-only devices. But wax
cylinder phonographs and, later, disk-cutting machines could always be
purchased. Cumbersome though they were, these found their way into
the field. American ethnologists and European comparative musicolo-
gists used them extensively.23 Among zoologists, the best known
proponent was Ludwig Koch, who, from his childhood in Germany in
20
Some clarification is required here. Diamond in the quotation refers to ‘‘grunts.’’ For
the nonspecialist, it is natural enough to use that word to describe all vervet vocaliza-
tions, the alarm calls included. And so Diamond does (p. 50): ‘‘When you listen to
vervets, it at first appears that they are uttering undifferentiated grunts. But if you listen
carefully, you may be able to distinguish differences among the grunts. Experiments with
tape recording and playback of wild vervet vocalizations revealed that the vervets have at
least ten different grunts, including separate ‘words’ for their three major predators
(leopards, snakes, and eagles) . . . .’’ Struhsaker, however, and Cheney and Seyfarth after
him, have always distinguished the grunts of the vervets from their predator alarm calls.
On the playback-based grunt experiments that followed on from the initial playback-
based alarm call experiments, see Seyfarth and Cheney, 1992, p. 339. The page reference
is to the 1996 reprint.
21
For a contemporary assessment of ‘‘recent advances in the recording of bird-songs,’’
including portable magnetic tape recorders and the sound spectrograph, see Simms and
Wade, 1953. On these advances as fomenting modern bioacoustics, see Falls, 1992, p.
13, and Owings and Morton, 1998, pp. 35–36.
22
Before the introduction of the sound spectrograph, oscillographs were used for the
physical analysis of animal and other sounds. See Borror, 1960, p. 28. Garner employed
a little-remembered instrument called the phoneidoscope. See Radick, 2003a, pp. 195,
205 (n. 93)
23
On the phonograph in ethnographic fieldwork in the United States, see Brady, 1999.
On its use in what became ethnomusicology, see Shelemay, 1991, pp. 279–282. I have
learnt much on the latter topic from unpublished essays by Gerald Fabris and Alex-
ander Rehding.
the 1890s to his long career at the BBC, specialized in the recording of
bird song in the wild.24 But there were others. In the 1910s, as Marion
Thomas shows elsewhere in this issue, the French scientist Louis Boutan
used the phonograph in Garnerian research into gibbon language. In the
1920s, Raymond Ditmars, reptile specialist at the Bronx zoo and a
longtime friend and supporter of Garner’s, was engaged in experimental
work with a macaque. A month after Garner’s death in 1920, a New
York newspaper reported that an ‘‘old style cylinder phonograph was
employed by Dr. Ditmars in an experiment in recording monkey speech
and then observing the animal’s reactions to the reproduction of its own
voice.’’25 In the 1930s, Koch collaborated with Julian Huxley, a dis-
tinguished observer and theorist of bird behavior (among many other
things), on Animal Language, a lavish ‘‘sound book’’ combining text,
photographs, and records of animals in zoos, mainly in Regent’s Park
and Whipsnade. As Huxley explained, after recording, the two men
assayed ‘‘the animals’ reactions to their own sounds as recorded here.
Mr. Koch has played these from the records to most of the animals used.
The results were rather surprising. Some animals became excited, while
others showed no reactions at all.’’ Among the animals thus studied
were a mandrill, a mangabey, and a baboon.26
In 1937, the same year as Koch’s zoo playbacks in England, the
American physiological psychologist Clarence Ray Carpenter con-
ducted field playbacks in the jungles of Siam. Their circumscribed
nature is instructive. Carpenter was in Siam, as is well known, with a
group investigating the anatomy and behavior of the native gibbons.
For purposes of studying their vocalizations, he had brought along
customized recording equipment and associated paraphernalia. His
monograph on the expedition presented a detailed typology of gibbon
calls and quantitative data on their frequency in the course of a day.
Acutely interested in the social functions of calls, he dwelt especially on
the ‘‘stimulus situations’’ that elicited vocalization and on the responses
thus stimulated in others. He seems, however, to have based his
24
Koch, 1955.
25
Sparkes, 1920. Ditmars was described as ‘‘a strong advocate of the theories of
Professor Garner.’’
26
Huxley and Koch, 1938, pp. 5–6, quotation on p. 5. See also Koch, 1955, pp. 52, 67.
Huxley – who as Secretary of the Zoological Society of London effectively ran the
Regent’s Park and Whipsnade zoos – was quite taken with these activities: ‘‘Students of
animal behaviour will be able to make experiments on the differences between related
species, on the share of what is innate and what is learnt in determining reaction (or
absence of reaction) to specific sounds, and so on. In any case, it is clear that an
interesting field, with both practical and theoretical sides, is here opened up by the
advance of technique’’ (p. 6).
470 GREGORY RADICK
functional characterizations on observations alone, following the pat-

tern of his earlier, recorder-less field study of howler monkeys. He re-
ported no playback experiments done to check his conjectures about
function. Rather, he deferred such experiments for future laboratory
investigations, much like the ones he had once done on the influence of
hormones on animal behavior. ‘‘It is especially desirable,’’ wrote Car-
penter, ‘‘to isolate individual specimens from extraneous factors, stim-
ulate them with single vocal patterns and record the overt responses.’’ In
the wild, these patterns’ ‘‘functions are extremely difficult to infer,’’ not
least, according to Carpenter, because it had proved impossible to record
anything except high-volume, inter-group vocalizations.27 Nevertheless,
as Georgina Montgomery emphasizes elsewhere in this issue, there were
some field playbacks. Carpenter did not, in his published remarks,
describe them as ‘‘experiments,’’ and he drew no particular attention to
them at the time.28 Nor did he become well known for them. But, on
several occasions, he did listen for and watch for the responses from
surrounding gibbons while reproducing their recorded voices.
There is no harm in letting technological determinism do a little
explaining here. Lug all that fancy apparatus into the jungle and, at
some time or another, you will find yourself reproducing the sounds of
27
Carpenter, 1940, pp. 169–182, quotations on pp. 170, 178. The phrase ‘‘stimulus
situation’’ is on p. 169 and the table on p. 171. For the comparable section of the howler
monograph, see Carpenter, 1934, pp. 107–112. On the physiological legacy in Car-
penter’s primatological work, see Haraway, 1989, pp. 86ff., and Montgomery, this issue.
In his historical survey of playbacks, J. Bruce Falls has noted that the technique is ‘‘a
special case of methods used for a long time by physiologists to study stimulus-response
systems.’’ Falls, 1992, p. 13.
28
In his 212-page 1940 monograph, there is, as far as I can tell, just one sentence. It
occurs in a passage about how easy it is to stimulate gibbons to vocalize. All a gibbon
needs to be set off, Carpenter wrote, is to hear another gibbon, or even ‘‘a person roughly
imitating’’ a gibbon. Even a reproduced record of a gibbon will serve, as Carpenter
discovered: ‘‘Coolidge and I had just made our first satisfactory recordings of Type II
calls produced by Group 1 and when we adjusted out recorder and played these back, the
vocalizations were answered one series after another’’ (p. 180). A shorter 1939 article
likewise contains one sentence: ‘‘Several times it was possible to stimulate the wild ani-
mals to call by playing back to them the recordings of their own calls which had just been
made’’ (Carpenter, 1939, p. 325). Carpenter was much more effusive twenty-five years
later, in his contribution to a conference and then volume on animal communication.
Playback was now all the rage, and he credited himself with ‘‘originat[ing] in miniature’’
in Siam a procedure that could be used ‘‘for validating calls and for checking their fidelity
in terms of responses as well as providing a means of controlled study of the functions of
different sound signals’’ (Carpenter, 1969, p. 55). For the latter two references, I am
indebted to Georgina Montgomery, whose interpretation of their place in Carpenter’s
work is nevertheless different from my own. See Montgomery, Journal of the History of
Biology, 38(3): 495–533 (this issue).
the animals and noticing their responses. It is, in such a circumstance,

an obvious thing to do. And it was never more so than in the era when
Garner’s work was still within living memory.29 No doubt there were
other be-phonographed ethnologists and musicologists who did the
same, in otherwise quiet moments on the reservations and in the back-
country villages. There is nothing extraordinary about playbacks in
themselves, given the existence of recording technology capable of
performing them. What is extraordinary is that the playback experiment
ever became the center of a major scientific research effort into primate
communication, and that the results were of interest to a wider com-
munity. The challenge lies in accounting for how that happened, not
once but twice. Why 1890 and 1980? What made the playback experi-
ment with primates something worth doing, and worth attending to, at
those times but not at others?
Garner’s Primate Playbacks, or, Why 1890?
The origin of language has puzzled thinkers since antiquity. But with
the rise of evolutionism in the mid-nineteenth century, the puzzle
became at once more precise and more pressing. Much more so than in
the past, debate now centered on comparisons and contrasts between
human language and the vocal productions of non-human animals.
Those opposed to the ‘‘ape theory’’ routinely adduced language as fatal
to the theory since, by their lights, language appeared to have no
analogues among the lower animals. The anti-Darwinian case was put
most firmly and famously by the Oxford Sanskritist and scientific
publicist Friedrich Max Müller.30
According to Müller, the only positive evidence available for scien-
tific inferences about the origin of language was the linguistic roots – the
irreducible elements of language, into which the different languages of
the world could be resolved. The most rigorous comparative-philolog-
ical scholarship showed, he claimed, that these roots always had
abstract meanings. Since the roots were conceptual and, by definition,
irreducible, they could not, he argued, have evolved from still more
29
In his 1940 monograph, Carpenter cited Garner’s 1900 book Apes and Monkeys:
Their Life and Language (1900).
30
On language in the Victorian debates over Darwinism, and Müller’s role in partic-
ular, see Radick, 2000b, esp. chs. 1 and 2. A useful collection of primary sources is
Harris, 1996. For developments in the German context, see DiGregorio, 2002. An
admirably concise and comprehensive historical survey of theorizing about the origin of
language is Hewes, 1996. See esp. the tables on pp. 573–575, 577–578, and 580–581. For
a less telegraphic treatment, see Stam, 1976.
472 GREGORY RADICK
primitive proto-roots. Far from showing traces of evolution from ani-

mal antecedents, then, the roots from which human languages grew
must have come into being fully formed, completely abstract, sometime
near the beginning of man’s tenure on earth. Müller first stated these
views in 1861, in a much-discussed lecture series at the Royal Institution
in London. Over the next thirty years, his argument underwent inter-
esting changes, some quite concessionary. On the whole, however, he
was resolute: an evolutionary account of the origin of language foun-
dered on the evidence.31In his 1873 ‘‘Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s
Philosophy of Language,’’ also at the Royal Institution, he put the
challenge plainly: ‘‘Show me only one single root in the language of
animals, such as AK, to be sharp and quick; and from it two such
derivatives as asva, the quick one – the horse – and acutus, sharp or
quick-witted . . . and I should say that, as far as language is concerned,
we cannot oppose Mr Darwin’s argument, and that man has, or at least
may have been, developed from some lower animal.’’32 At the summer
1891 meeting of the British Association, Müller, speaking as President
of the Anthropology section, looked back on his long campaign with
satisfaction. ‘‘It required some courage at times to stand up against the
authority of Darwin,’’ he told his audience, ‘‘but at present all serious
thinkers agree . . . that there is a specific difference between the human
animal and all other animals, and that that difference consists in
language.’’33
Müller’s popular reputation as a man of science was immense, and
his provocation to the evolutionists therefore a serious one. It received
its most potent answer in Garner’s research program. The phono-
graphic experiments, supplemented with a number of interesting psy-
chological ones, seemed to furnish positive evidence that language
among the non-human animals was no different in kind from human
language.34 Watching Garner at work in the monkey house in the
zoological gardens of New York’s Central Park in December 1891, one
onlooker–‘‘somebody who wanted to flaunt his erudition,’’ as the
journalist on hand waspishly put it – was said to ask: ‘‘And what’s to
become of the Max Müller business about Sanskrit?’’ Appearing in
Harper’s Weekly, the report on the Central Park experiments under-
scored the importance of the experiments for the Darwinian cause: ‘‘If
we accept the Darwinian theory, and should Mr. Garner’s life work be
accomplished, the advocates of evolution will have found a new and
31
On Müller’s life and thought, see Radick, 2004.
32
Müller, 1873, p. 229, emphasis in original. Page reference is to the 1996 reprint.
33
Müller, 1891, p. 429, emphasis in original.
34
On Müller as both target and resource for Garner, see Radick, 2000a, pp. 11–15.
strong argument in their favor.’’35 As Garner began to prepare for his

expedition to Africa, the house journal of the phonograph industry, the
Phonogram, likewise declared: ‘‘The Phonograph to Aid in Establishing
the Darwinian Theory.’’36
To explain why the primate playback experiment came to be invented
in 1890, it is not quite enough to notice – in addition to the prominence
of suitable apparatus – this public controversy over human language,
animal language, scientific authority, and the evolutionary theory. We
need also to take into account Garner’s particular conception of that
theory. In Harper’s Weekly, Garner was quoted as follows:
Granted that I have got to the bottom of monkey talk, my task
would be but half accomplished. I will have but forged a single link
in the chain. I want another. I propose to take down the speech of
the lowest specimens of the human race – the pygmies, the Bush-
men . . . the Hottentot cluck and click. If there be family resem-
blance, structural relationship, between the Rhesus monkey, the
chimpanzee, and the lower grades of humanity, there may be
correlation of speech, philological kinship, and then – and then –
the origin of man’s talk might be found.37
The ideas about evolution, race, and language here were absolutely
commonplace in the second half of the nineteenth century. They included:
that evolutionary change was gradual and progressive; that its highest
products were humans; that the lowest humans were the savage or bar-
barous races, such as the Fuegians or the Australian aborigines or the
Hottentots; that the highest races were the civilized ones, especially the
white European civilized ones; and that human racial highness and low-
ness showed itself in body as well as mind, including language. It is
sometimes said that these belong to a ‘‘non-Darwinian revolution,’’ since
real Darwinism, or at least Darwin himself, had little truck with talk of
higher and lower, or evolutionary hierarchy.38 But even Darwin accepted
that gradual evolution had produced a world where lesser human races
spoke lesser languages. By and large, it was the anti-evolutionists of the
day who argued otherwise. Darwin understood the hierarchy among
living beings as something his theory predicted and explained.39
35
Phillips, 1891.
36
‘‘The Phonograph to Aid. . .,’’ 1892.
37
Phillips, 1891.
38
On Darwin as an anti-progressionist, out of step with his times, see Gould, 1996,
discussed in Radick, 2000c. On the ‘‘non-Darwinian’’ nature of evolutionary thinking in
the nineteenth century, see Bowler, 1988.
39
On Darwin’s defense of hierarchy among human languages as a product of gradual
evolution, see Radick, 2002.
474 GREGORY RADICK
Nevertheless, Darwin’s handling of hierarchy, and in particular his

handling of apparent gaps, such as the one that appeared to separate the
lowest language-using humans and the highest animals, marked the elite
Darwin from non-elite thinkers on evolution such as Garner. Darwin
accepted that the apparent language gap was real. But for him, crucially, it
yawned between descendants of a long extinct common ancestor, not
between descendants and ancestors. In effect Darwin filled the gap with a
plausible conjecture about the past. Far from rejecting or undermining
hierarchy, he historicized it.40 Less sophisticated evolutionists tended not
to exercise this option. They had an attenuated to non-existent sense of
present species as tips on an irregularly-branching tree extending deep into
the past. Garner’s solution to the gap problem belongs to this more
popular, present-centered conception of gradual evolution. He argued
that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the hierarchical scale
did indeed extend from the lowest existing human race straight through to
the highest existing animals. People like Darwin had failed to detect this
continuity, in Garner’s view, because the simian tongues were so rapid and
subtly modulated. What was needed was a machine that could record
simian utterances, thus enabling their analysis, not least through repeti-
tion back to the animals under controlled conditions. What was needed, in
short, was the phonograph.
For Garner, the playback experiment was so important because it
proved just what the theory of evolution, as he understood it, predicted:
that just below the most primitive human race, with its primitive lan-
guage, there was an animal species speaking a still more primitive lan-
guage. In his first ‘‘Simian Tongue’’ article, Garner described how
through these sorts of experiments he had translated Capuchin words
for ‘‘food,’’ ‘‘drink,’’ ‘‘sickness,’’ ‘‘storm,’’ and ‘‘alarm.’’ These in turn,
as he wrote in the third installment, could be slotted into a hierarchy,
with the words of spider monkeys below, the words of chimpanzees
above, and ‘‘the lowest order of human speech’’ a further step up.
Garner was in no doubt that the utterances he was translating counted
as words. Where the most highly evolved humans, under demanding
conditions of life, used complex sounds to transmit complex ideas
between complex minds, so monkeys, under less demanding conditions
of life, used simple sounds to transmit simple ideas between simple
40
For Darwin’s handling of the ‘‘great break in the organic chain between man and his
nearest allies,’’ see Darwin, 1871, p. 200. For Darwin’s account of the evolutionary
origins of language, see esp. ch. 2, pp. 53–62 and ch. 19, pp. 330–337. For discussion of
aspects of this account, see, e.g., Radick, 2002 and Richards, 2002. For a concise survey
of Darwin’s theorizing on ‘‘man’s place in nature,’’ see Richards, 2003.
minds. Simian words were no different in kind from human words, and
no less well adapted to the purpose of language.41
In sum, then, there are several important clues to ‘‘why 1890?’’ in
Garner’s material and intellectual circumstances: in his living at a time
and place where credibly good-enough phonographs were around, and
when a widespread conception of evolution – and well-known doubts
about it – put a premium on the discovery of humanlike language
among the non-human primates. Indeed, it may have fallen to an
amateur scientist to invent the primate playback experiment precisely
because a more elite figure would not have seen in its results facts that
bore directly on human evolution.
Garner, it should be noted, made no apologies for being an amateur.
Consider his public farewell, published on the eve of his journey to the
French Congo in 1892:
Many who are called men of science spend their lives in acquiring
knowledge of what others have done, and these men of letters are
usually regarded as the high priests of science; but they are really
the laymen, and in very few instances have they ever added any-
thing to the volume of human knowledge; and while it seems to be
an innate law that one must rule and ninety-nine serve, I do not
envy those who stand and wait, who are content to plod along the
graded ways of science and simply learn what other men have
known; I prefer to lead the way, however difficult. . .. I would rather
blaze one mile through the forests of science than travel forty
leagues along the paved and lighted thoroughfares of learning. I
would rather find the bones of one new and unknown genus than
possess a whole museum of familiar forms; and so I feel about the
‘Simian Tongue.’. . .. The results of such an expedition [as mine],
however meagre in comparison with what may justly be hoped, will
contribute more to philology than all the books and theses of
modern times.42
Garner presented his amateur status as a source of epistemic and moral
virtue. As he saw it, the academy housed spineless, scholastic bigots,
content to spin their prejudices into arguments from the comfort of their
armchairs. The real scientist was the amateur, and the real academy the
field – first the zoological gardens, then the jungle.
41
Garner, 1891; Garner, 1892b, quotation on p. 331 of the 1996 reprint.
42
Garner, 1892c, pp. 291–292.
476 GREGORY RADICK
The Rockefeller Group’s Primate Playbacks, or, Why 1980?
Great things were expected from Garner and the primate playback
experiment. So what happened? A full account lies outside the remit of
this paper. But a brief one should mention two developments, of very
different kinds. The first is the scandal that engulfed Garner on his
return from Africa in the mid-1890s, when he was accused of having
spent virtually no time at all in his famous cage. The second is the rise of
new disciplines with jurisdiction over the human-animal boundary –
chiefly physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and comparative
psychology. Each of these sciences took shape in ways that made the
primate playback experiment almost literally unthinkable. The idea of
conducting playback experiments with primates in a sustained and
systematic way – that is, of posing the question about an experimental
test of meaning in natural primate vocalizations, and devoting time and
resources to its prosecution – was simply not one that occurred to most
ambitious anthropologists and psychologists in the twentieth century.43
When the idea of the primate playback experiment was again
entertained seriously, it was within the context of another distinctly
twentieth-century science: ethology. The leading exponents of ethology,
in the 1930s and 1940s, struggled to institutionalize their discipline in a
world where a rival science, comparative psychology, was already well
established. Forced to compete with comparative psychology, the
ethologists presented themselves as correcting deficiencies in the reign-
ing science of animal behaviour. To a very large extent, the ethologists
defined their science against comparative psychology, or, more pre-
cisely, against a caricature of that rather heterogeneous science.44 In the
doctrine that grew up, it was said that psychologists studied animals in
order to understand humans, and so wound up misunderstanding both.
43
An interesting partial exception is Carpenter, working at the boundaries of physi-
ology, psychology, and anthropology. As already discussed, in the late 1930s, he did
entertain the idea of the primate playback experiment. He did not, however, act on it
except in a desultory way, nor did his example inspire anyone else to take it up. He may
have been deflected by observations made in Siam, suggesting to him that gibbon calls
had functional identities only in context, not in themselves. See Carpenter, 1940, p. 140.
For a summary of the disciplinary changes in anthropology and psychology mentioned
here, see Radick, 2000b, ch. 5.
44
On the origins and development of ethology, see Burkhardt, 2005. Burkhardt
emphasizes that the major contrasts drawn with psychology were two-fold. There were
criticisms of comparative psychologists, in the American and behaviorist mode, but also
of psychologists who resisted an objective, causal analysis of animal behavior alto-
gether. On the history of comparative psychology, see Boakes, 1984. On the consider-
able overlap between ethology and comparative psychology, see Dewsbury, 1992.
The rat in the psychologist’s maze, the cat in the puzzle-box, the
monkey in the choice-chamber: all found themselves acting under
conditions of no relevance to their natural lives. Worse, since these
animals could only extract themselves from such artificial experimental
set-ups through trial-and-error, the psychologist, who never studied
animals in nature, concluded that animal behavior, including human
behavior, owed nothing to instinct, and everything to trial-and-error
learning. The ethologist, it was said, did not make these mistakes.
Unlike psychologists, who failed to divest themselves of a human-ori-
ented perspective in their studies of animals, ethologists studied animal
behaviour on the animals’ terms.
This disciplinary contrast with psychology lay at the core of the
ethological self-conception. One can find it in the programmatic writ-
ings of the founders, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, and also
of followers such as William Thorpe, who established ethology at
Cambridge.45 More importantly for understanding how the primate
playback experiment became thinkable again, the contrast appears in
the early writings of Thorpe’s first ethological student, Peter Marler.46
In the 1950s Marler worked with Thorpe on an experimental study of
song learning in the chaffinch – a study making extensive use of play-
back of recorded song (to see, for instance, what restrictions there are
on the songs that birds can learn and when they can be learned).47
Independently of Thorpe, Marler also developed an interest in the new
information theory and its bearing on understanding animal commu-
nication systems. In a major paper on these themes, ‘‘The Logical
Analysis of Animal Communication’’ (1961), Marler situated himself
within the ethological tradition, and by way of the traditional contrast:
Comparative psychologists have neglected the subject of animal
communication to a remarkable degree – remarkable, that is, until
one reflects on the anthropocentric point of view of most psy-
chologists. . . . The main concern has been to differentiate man and
the animals, rather than to determine the properties which their
‘languages’ may have in common. Dozens of cases could be cited
where this prejudice has influenced the questions that are asked,
and therefore the answers obtained. . .. Instead of approaching
45
See, e.g., Tinbergen, 1942, p. 42; Lorenz, 1950, p. 230; Thorpe, 1979, pp. vii–x.
46
On Marler’s path to Cambridge, and his life and career generally, see his autobio-
graphical essay, Marler, 1985a.
47
Thorpe, 1958. See Falls, 1992, p. 23, for a discussion of the experiments in the
wider context of bird playback studies in North America and elsewhere around this
time.
478 GREGORY RADICK
animal communication with anthropocentric preconceptions, they

[he has named Lorenz, Tinbergen, and Thorpe] set out to describe
the natural behavior in objective terms, seeking to derive conclu-
sions about the evolutionary basis of behavior.48
At Berkeley from 1957 and then, from 1966, at the Rockefeller, Marler
increasingly divided his time between lab-based studies of bird vocaliza-
tions and field-based studies of primate vocalizations. He had first im-
mersed himself in the literature on primate communication before leaving
Cambridge, in the course of preparing a long homage to and update of
Darwin’s work on expression. It appeared in 1959, in a book published as
part of the celebrations that year to mark the centenary of the Origin. In
primate studies, this was still the era of Carpenter and Solly Zuckerman;
the most recent research Marler could find to discuss on communication
in primates dated from the 1920s and 1930s, when Carpenter, the Yerkes,
and the Russian psychologist Nadia Kohts were active.49 Over the next
few years, the situation improved rapidly, thanks in large part to one of
Marler’s senior colleagues at Berkeley, the physical anthropologist
Sherwood Washburn. Washburn believed that observation of living pri-
mates – apes and monkeys but also hunter-gatherers – would illuminate
the Darwinian agencies at work in the hominid past, and to that end
started sending his students to Marler for instruction in behavioral
zoology en route to their field studies. Soon Marler was caught up in the
primatological enthusiasm. At Washburn’s invitation, Marler contrib-
uted a survey paper on primate communication to a volume on recent field
studies of the behavior of apes and monkeys.50 He also started doing and
supervising those studies himself, concentrating on the somewhat
neglected topic of vocal communication.51
His interest in the vervet alarm calls and their meaning arose at the
conjunction of two developments. One was his Ph.D. student Thomas
Struhsaker’s discovery of the alarm calls, made in the course of observing
48
Marler, 1961, quotations from pp. 296–297.
49
Marler, 1959, pp. 170–171, 202–203. See also Marler, 1985a, p. 330. Marler also
(1959, pp. 202–203) discussed Louis Boutan’s gibbon research from the 1910s favorably.
On Boutan, see Thomas, Journal of the History of Biology 38(3): 425–460 (this issue).
50
Marler, 1965; Marler, 1985a, pp. 330–331. On Washburn and his reforms of physical
anthropology, see Strum et al., 1999 and Haraway, 1989. On the emergence of field
primatology more generally, see Radick, in press (a) and Rees, in press. Washburn had
been a member, with Carpenter, of the gibbon expedition to Siam in the late 1930s. See
Montgomery, Journal of the History of Biology 38(3): 495–533 (this issue).
51
See, e.g., Marler, 1973.
and recording the vervet monkeys of Amboseli Reserve in Kenya in

1963–1964.52No playback experiments were deployed; at this time,
playback, for Marler as for his students, was still a solidly lab-based and
ornithological technique. Nor did Struhsaker treat the alarm call
discoveries as especially interesting. It was Marler, not Struhsaker, who
picked them out from among Struhsaker’s results and publicized them as
bearing on questions of ‘‘semanticity,’’ in an important 1967 review article
in Science. The vervet alarm calls, Marler here suggested, might be gen-
uinely semantic animal signals – might, that is, represent or symbolize
leopards or snakes or eagles. ‘‘Although the relationships are not specific
enough for us to think of the three signals as names for the three types of
predators mentioned,’’ he wrote, ‘‘in principle, these signals begin to
approach the phenomenon of object naming.’’53 That phrase ‘‘object
naming’’ points up the second development behind Marler’s new interest:
the emergence of a neuroscientific consensus, also in the mid-1960s, on the
wholly emotional character of vocalizations in nonhuman primates. The
difference between humans and the nonhuman primates, it was held, was
that humans alone had the cerebral wiring needed to support the easy
formation of associations between sights and sounds – the anatomical
platform needed to name objects. Naming was thus impossible for apes
and monkeys. Indeed, their vocalizations seemed exclusively to be prod-
ucts of the brain’s emotional seat, the evolutionarily primitive limbic
system. The Washburnian anthropologists, as admirers of functional
anatomical research, quickly drew the lesson that the vervet predator calls
simply could not be predator names, no matter how much the calls looked
like names to the behavioral zoologist. Like all other primate vocaliza-
tions, the vervet calls were not symbolic, but affective.54
At the Rockefeller, meanwhile, Marler found himself working along-
side colleagues, notably the zoologist Donald Griffin, with a bullish atti-
tude toward the experimental study of cognition, and little inclined to
52
Struhsaker, 1967, esp. pp. 305–317. For simplicity I have followed the summary in
Marler, 1967. The alarm-call taxonomy that Struhsaker presented is somewhat more
complicated. Struhsaker’s oft-reprinted charts of vocalizations are clearly modelled on
Carpenter’s.
53
Marler, 1967, pp. 771–772, quotation on p. 772.
54
See Lancaster, 1968 and Marshall, 1970. For a much fuller discussion of the new
neuroscience and Marler’s response to it than can be presented here, see Radick, in press
(a).
480 GREGORY RADICK
uphold old behaviorist taboos about anthropomorphism.55 From around

1970, furthermore, playbacks had ceased to be the exclusive property of
just the ornithological students under Marler’s supervision. In 1972, one
of Marler’s doctoral students at the Rockefeller, Peter Waser, working in
Uganda, successfully conducted playbacks with monkeys in the wild.56
But Waser’s research had nothing to do with animal semantics. His
concern was with the function, not the meaning, of the calls that echo
between groups of mangabeys.57 What drew the various controversies and
competencies together into a case for vervet playbacks, around 1975, was
the stimulus of another discipline, the old rival to ethology: comparative
psychology.58 Starting in the mid-1960s, academic psychologists had been
engaged in high-profile attempts to teach apes to communicate symboli-
cally – the ‘‘ape language projects,’’ as they came to be known. In Reno,
Allen and Beatrice Gardner were teaching a chimpanzee named Washoe
to use sign language. In Santa Barbara, David and Ann Premack were
coaching another chimpanzee, Sarah, in the use of a complex system of
plastic icons. Throughout the 1970s similar projects sprouted elsewhere,
involving chimpanzees but also gorillas and orangutans.59 And in 1975, at
the beginning of what would be the period of greatest prominence for the
projects, David Premack – their most acute and ambitious theoretician –
55
Griffin’s classic 1976 book The Question of Animal Awareness was a manifesto for a
new cognitive ethology. See esp. Griffin, 1976, esp. ch. 7, where he called for an
experimentally rigorous ‘‘participatory investigation of animal communication’’ (p. 89),
and emphasized the likely usefulness of playbacks in such an enterprise (pp. 90–91).
Griffin had been airing the book’s theses in seminars at the Rockefeller for some time;
see Marler, 1985a, p. 338. On Griffin and Marler’s role in experiments widely interpreted
as vindicating the symbolic nature of the bee dance, see Munz, Journal of the History of
Biology 38(3): 535–570 (this issue).
56
Waser, 1975.
57
In 1977, in a long piece written with Richard Tenaza on ape vocalizations as signals,
Marler wrote of the promise of field playbacks in the study of functional questions,
citing Waser’s mangabey research. See Marler and Tenaza, 1977, p. 1029. The dis-
tinction I have drawn between function and meaning is, while useful up to a point, not
at all clean. Marler wrote from time to time of the ‘‘semantic function’’ of animal calls.
58
The ape language projects do not figure at all in Marler’s account of the origins of
the vervet playback experiments in his 1985 autobiographical essay, or in Cheney and
Seyfarth’s account in their 1990 book. See Marler, 1985a, p. 338 and Cheney and
Seyfarth, 1990, pp. 102–105.
59
For recent historical surveys of the ape language projects – some of which still
continue – see Ristau, 1996 and Wallman, 1992. On the Gardners’ and the Premacks’
initial efforts at instruction – begun in 1966 in both cases – see, respectively, Gardner
and Gardner, 1969 and Premack, 1971 (though Premack had been involved in an earlier,
related project; see Premack and Schwartz, 1966). Although the Gardners were working
in a psychology department, Beatrice Gardner had trained in ethology with Tinbergen
at Oxford. See Fouts, 1997, p. 28.
stated categorically that non-human animals in the wild do not commu-

nicate symbolically. ‘‘Man has both affective and symbolic communica-
tion,’’ he wrote. ‘‘All other species, except when tutored by man. . . , have
only the affective form.’’60
The combined provocation of the ape-brain anthropologists and the
ape-behavior psychologists pushed Marler to confront this skeptical
interpretation, and to do so as an ethologist correcting psychological
deficiencies. He responded in two ways. First, he started publicizing his
doubts about the usefulness of the affect-versus-symbol opposition,
especially as a framework for understanding the meanings of primate
vocalizations. In Marler’s Darwinian view, affective and symbolic
signals had to be understood as opposite poles on a continuum, with
natural selection determining where along that continuum a particular
signal sits. The question, then, was not whether vervet alarm calls might
be wholly symbolic, but whether they might not be wholly affective, in
ways that experimental study could establish.61 Second, he arranged for
two postdocs – an American husband-and-wife team, educated, like
him, in Cambridge ethology – to use playbacks to test for semanticity in
the alarm calls of Amboseli vervets. Until they joined Marler’s labo-
ratory, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney had known little about
vocal communication and its study. Their expertise was as observers
and theorists of social behaviour in baboons; and when they left for
Amboseli in spring 1977, they were much more excited about the
prospects of using the playback technique to explore vervet–vervet
relationships than vervet–environment ones. Once in the field, however,
they found the alarm call behavior utterly absorbing. By the time
60
Premack, 1975, p. 593.
61
See Marler, 1977. For Marler’s discussions with Premack about this subject, see p.
229 of the 1980 reprint. A somewhat different version appeared as Marler, 1978. In The
Question of Animal Awareness, Donald Griffin referred readers to Premack’s and
Marler’s recent writings, commenting: ‘‘much animal communication conveys an
emotional or affective state, such as fear. Except for the dances of honeybees, and the
sign language recently taught to captive chimpanzees, it is difficult to judge from
available data whether animal communication behavior also includes specific infor-
mation about the nature of the object or situation responsible for the emotional state
conveyed. But rather than assuming the absence of such information a priori, it seems
advisable to consider this an open question to be investigated’’ (Griffin, 1976, p. 98).
482 GREGORY RADICK
Marler came out to Amboseli in the summer of that year to help with
the first playback trials, Seyfarth and Cheney were hooked.62
Between 1975, when Seyfarth and Cheney first contacted Marler, and
1980, when their playback research was published, the ape language
projects enjoyed their greatest popular cachet. Not since Garner’s day
had the topics of animal-human communication and the evolutionary
origins of language commanded so much scientific and journalistic
attention.63 The excitement was well captured in books of earnest
reportage such as Eugene Linden’s Apes, Men, and Language (1974) and
Adrian Desmond’s The Ape’s Reflexion (1979).64 The project psychol-
ogists had always had their critics, of course. In 1980, however, the
criticisms started to look fatal, thanks to the recent recantations of one
of the project psychologists, Herbert Terrace at Columbia. He had
concluded that his sign-tutored chimpanzee, Neam (‘‘Nim’’) Chimpsky,
had not in fact learned to communicate symbolically, but had merely
succeeded at imitating the signs of his teachers.65 In March 1980, Time
asked ‘‘Are Those Apes Really Talking?’’ In May, the New Yorker ran a
typically amused item on a conference devoted to excoriating the project
psychologists as hapless victims of ‘‘Clever Hans’’ anthropomorphism.
‘‘The tone,’’ it was reported, was well ‘‘summed up by a participant who
said ‘the tide had turned’ against the ape-language studies.’’66
It was against this backdrop of disillusion with and disarray
among the psychological tutors of apes that the Rockefeller group’s
papers became so celebrated. In their scientific papers, the group
drew the contrast between the ape language projects and the vervet
playback experiments explicitly.67 It was most vivid, however, in a
popular article published a little later by Seyfarth, ‘‘Talking with
Monkeys and Great Apes.’’ After discussing the apparently endless
62
This account draws partly on my interviews with Marler, Cheney, and Seyfarth,
partly on my reading of Seyfarth and Cheney’s scientific papers from the era, and partly
on unpublished letters and research proposals in Peter Marler’s collection of personal
papers, presently stored in his office at the University of California at Davis. An ex-
panded and documented version of this account will be included in a book currently in
preparation.
63
The bulge in media presence in North America in these years can be traced in the
‘‘Animal Communication’’ entries in successive editions of the Reader’s Guide to Peri-
odical Literature.
64
Linden, 1974; Desmond, 1979. Linden (pp. 248–254) describes Marler’s talk at a
1972 symposium on the ape language projects.
65
Terrace et al., 1979 – published in November of that year. On the Nim project, see,
e.g., Wallman, 1992, pp 22–24, 86–89.
66
‘‘Are Those . . . ?’’, 1980; ‘‘Conference’’, 1980, quotation on p. 29.
67
Seyfarth et al., 1980a, p. 1070; 1980b, p. 801.
debates surrounding the work of the psychologists on primate com-

munication, he wrote:
In the midst of this hoopla, a newer group of scientists, in which I

include myself, has emerged. We argue that animals in the ape
language projects have been brought into a human world, taught a
human sort of communication and been tested in human terms.
Given the fact that few Americans, for example, would perform to
the best of their ability if quizzed, say, in Nepalese, the design of the
ape language projects may have led researchers to underestimate
the natural abilities of their subjects. Why not, then, try to enter the
monkeys’ and apes’ habitats, learn their systems of communication
and evaluate their abilities on their own terms?. . . [Our] results gave
us convincing proof that monkeys in the wild could do at least
some of the things that had previously been done only by apes in
the laboratory. It seemed clear that if we were patient enough, and
designed our experiments correctly, we could get the animals to tell
us how they communicate with each other, and we could do this
without teaching, in an environment where the monkeys were free
to choose their own method of communication and topics of
conversation.68
Conclusions
The history of the sciences is the history of certain questions coming to

be asked and, sometimes, answered. A major task for historians is to
reconstruct the conditions which gave life to questions, making them
real, compelling, irresistible, for a community of enquirers – and per-
haps the wider world – at a particular time and place. A connected task
is to understand how once-live questions lost their vitality. To say this is
hardly novel. Two of the most historically-minded philosophers of the
sciences in our time, Nicholas Jardine and Ian Hacking, have raised just
this question about questions.69 And yet, surprisingly few historical
works address it squarely. A meta-question lurks here, about the con-
ditions under which historians take seriously the questions scientists
68
Seyfarth, 1982, pp. 15, 18. For Marler’s similar contrasting of the two approaches to
primate semantics – the training of captive animals to communicate with humans, using
artificial languages, and the experimentally-augmented observation of free-ranging
animals communicating with each other, using their natural language – see Marler,
1985b, esp. p. 505.
69
Jardine, 1991; Hacking, 1999, esp. pp. 163–166.
484 GREGORY RADICK
pose. But that is not the business of this paper. It has used the long-run
of scientific studies of non-human primate communication to show how
unobvious was an apparently simple idea: that to find out what primate
vocalizations mean, one should record them, play the recordings back
to the animals, and watch what happens. The question of what would be
revealed through playbacks with non-human primates only became an
obvious one to pursue, in a focused and persistent way, under highly
particular circumstances. The curious twist in this tale, of course, is that
this happened twice, in the latter parts of different centuries.
When we consider the experiment’s nineteenth-century invention, it
looks at first blush as if the mere existence of the improved phonograph
was sufficient to prompt its use in the experimental study of animal
language. Garner invented the primate playback experiment almost as
soon as it became technically possible. He did so, however, not as a
phonograph buff looking for new ways of applying the talking machine,
but as an evolutionist searching for a better means of translating the
utterances of monkeys. The key to Garner’s innovation lies, as we have
seen, with his engagement in the then-simmering debate over language
as fatal to the evolutionary theory. His own, decidedly non-elite
understanding of that theory also matters; a more subtly Darwinian
thinker might have been less confident that, in an evolved world,
simians must be found speaking a tongue slightly more primitive than
the tongue of the most savage humans. We should note too Garner’s
animus toward the academy. In travelling with cage and phonograph to
the French Congo, he presented himself as the true scientist, willing to
take the intellectual and physical risks before which the so-called pro-
fessionals trembled.
For the twentieth-century reinvention of the experiment, of course,
none of the above holds. The basic hardware had been around since
Garner’s day, improving steadily, and even, from time to time, used for
recording and playing back the vocalizations of primates. Evolutionary
theory had become imperturbably secure and, after the Second World
War, dissociated from old ideas of racial hierarchy. Furthermore, there
were now professional scientists, ethologists, who made a habit of
sometimes demanding field studies of the natural behavior patterns of
animals. What brought the primate playback experiment back into
existence, above all, was the flaring up of a disciplinary antagonism
around an ethologist with a unique cluster of interests: in the learning of
birdsong, studied in the lab with experimental playbacks; in primate
vocalizations, studied in the field; and in the characterization of animal
signals as bearers of information or meaning. No-one but an ethologist
could have made a career in these areas. And no-one was quite as prone
as an ethologist to criticize psychologists for studying animal behavior

on human rather than animal terms. The psychological ape-language
tutoring projects that flourished from the late-1960s to the late-1970s
found their comeuppance in the vervet alarm call experiments that
Marler assigned to Cheney and Seyfarth.70
So twice, following two quite different paths, history generated the
primate playback experiment. To what should we attribute such
robustness?71 Maybe nothing. Maybe things just turned out that way,
and there is nothing more general to say or explain. Such explanatory
minimalism, or maybe nihilism, recommends itself on several counts. It
is cleanly intelligible. It requires no extra work on the part of the his-
torian. And it conforms to recent trends in science historiography,
where the signature tone is relentlessly contingentist. All scientific
debates are discussed as if they could have gone any which way at any
given moment, but for the accidents of human character and position.
The conclusions agreed upon as to what is true, and the courses of
action taken to find out what is true, are presented as in the end
inseparable from the vagaries of social history. The implication, of
course, is that different social matrices would have brought about dif-
ferent conclusions and different courses of action. Nothing in science is
inevitable. The fact that the primate playback experiment came around
twice, independently, does not show that the experiment was bound to
happen, given a certain level of technical sophistication and enough
people committed to learning about the natural vocalizations of ani-
mals. It shows only, once again, that science is a social construction, if
sometimes with weird contours.
Certainly the history of the primate playback experiment is rich in
contingency. Most conspicuous are the events conspiring to drive the
experiment to the margins for nearly a century, despite huge positive
publicity. A tantalizing possibility is that, if Garner had returned from
Africa with phonographic evidence of language-like abilities in the
apes, there might never have arisen a comparative psychology for
ethology to define itself against. The English psychologist C. Lloyd
70
It should also be noted that ethology from its earliest days was a technophile science,
enthusiastically partnered to movie cameras and other recording and detection devices,
and to that extent as well a natural disciplinary setting for the primate playback
experiment. On ethological technophilia, see Mitman, 1999, ch. 3.
71
In what follows I explore some themes developed in complementary ways in Radick,
2003b; Radick, 2005; and Radick, in press (b). In conversation, Bob Batterman sug-
gested that the question I am groping toward here might be usefully reformulated in the
language of complexity theory, as whether or not the primate playback experiment is an
attractor in the space of possibilities for the scientific study of animal communication.
486 GREGORY RADICK
Morgan had announced himself, in 1893, quite prepared to drop his

arguments for a presumption of trial-and-error learning in animals if
presented with such evidence. He was not, and comparative psychology
grew up in the shadow of his stern rule of inference, known as Mor-
gan’s canon.72 Then there is the complex counterpoint of developments
in the ape language projects and in Marler’s immediate sphere. It is
easy enough to imagine the Struhsaker alarm call observations
remaining forever on Marler’s ‘‘to do’’ list without Premack’s provo-
cation, or to imagine the results of the alarm call experiments getting
little attention outside a small circle of ethologists and primatologists.
And so on. It is not difficult to multiply counterfactuals in a similar
spirit. Yet what distinguishes the history recounted here are less the
elements that lend themselves to a contingentist reading than the ele-
ments that do not.
Consider a striking contrast in rationale between the 1890 and 1980
instantiations of the experiment. Something absolutely fundamental to
Garner’s self-conception had no place whatsoever in the later work:
namely, that playback experiments needed doing because, if evolution
was true, the world ought to contain animals with human-like language
and humans with animal-like language. By the time of the vervet
playbacks, the consensus opinion, virtually unchallenged and perhaps,
now, unchallengable, was that all human languages are equal in their
complexity. None are more animal-like than any other. So while the
Rockefeller group believed in gradual evolution no less firmly than
Garner did, they in no way saw themselves as demonstrating the exis-
tence of a predicted hierarchy in nature. For them, if anything, evolu-
tionary considerations took an anti-hierarchical form. Marler wrote of
how amazing it would be if the capacities for symbolic communication
in the ape mind, on which the successes of the ape language psycholo-
gists depended, went unused in the course of the animals’ natural,
autonomous lives, but only emerged under a human-imposed tutoring
regime.73 If this does not amount to a straightforward reversal of
Garner’s rationale (whatever such a thing would be), it is both clearly
evolutionist, indeed adaptationist, and free of even a whiff of natural
hierarchy upheld. And while the scientific racism of the later nineteenth
century – what we might call its evolutionary politics – did not disap-
pear in the twentieth century, it did become officially unwelcome, and
increasingly so, not least among professional biologists in the United
States.74
72
See Radick, 2000a.
73
See, e.g., Marler, 1985b, p. 505.
74
See, e.g., the latter chapters of Ruse, 1996.
The primate playback experiment appears, then, to have been

invented with one evolutionary politics in mind and reinvented with an
opposite one in mind. It first arose against the backdrop of an unar-
guably hierarchical evolutionary theory, and arose a second time
against the backdrop of an arguably anti-hierachical evolutionary
theory. Two quite different social histories, in other words, produced
roughly the same conclusions about what is true and about how to find
it out. In this important respect, the experiment seems independent of a
certain kind of social–scientific determinant. That does not mean, of
course, that Garner’s context and the Rockefeller group’s context had
nothing relevant in common – that the conditions which prompted
Garner’s question were totally unlike the ones that prompted Marler’s.
Around 1890 and 1980, the animal origins of language had become
hugely controversial. At both times, there was a feeling that haughty
scientists were underestimating the natural abilities of non-human
primates. And at both times, the conducting of a field experiment
brought with it an unbeatable combination of moral and epistemic
authority: the authority of experiment over observation or speculation;
and the authority of nature over artifice.75 But even granting these
similarities, the difference in evolutionary politics deserves reflection,
on three counts. It raises the question of how, exactly, the mainstream
theory of evolution ever came to lose its prediction of racial hierarchy.
It reminds us that contingentism in the history of the sciences is to be
shown, not presumed. Finally, it shows that the choice between
contingentism and inevitabilism about the sciences is not the sterile,
evidence-free choice it is sometimes despairingly thought to be. The
facts of history can be used, if not to decide the issue, then at least to
make it less dichotomous, by helping us see concretely how a scientific
conclusion or method might be neither completely independent of its
historical context nor completely inseparable from it.
Acknowledgements
An ancestral version of this paper was presented at seminars in Leeds

and Cambridge in October 2002. More recent versions were pre-
sented at the ISHPSSB meeting in Vienna, July 2003; the ‘‘Fielding
the Question’’ workshop in Leeds, December 2003; and the History
75
The history of the primate playback experiment thus stands as a corrective to Robert
Kohler’s picture of biological field experiments as invariably falling short of the stan-
dards of good laboratory science and good field science. See Kohler, 2002, ch. 5.
488 GREGORY RADICK
of Human Sciences workshop, Fishbein Center, University of

Chicago, March 2004. I am grateful to all who participated on those
occasions for their helpful comments and suggestions. I owe particu-
lar debts to readers of a lengthy draft, including Jon Hodge, Cheryl
Logan, the JHB’s editors and referees, and my Vienna sessionmates,
whose contributions fill this issue. Georgina Montgomery was espe-
cially generous in sharing her work and views on Carpenter, from
which I learned a great deal. I wish also to thank Dorothy Cheney,
Irven DeVore, Marc Hauser, Robert Hinde, Peter Marler, Robert
Seyfarth, and Thomas Struhsaker for the interviews, correspondence,
and unpublished materials which proved crucial to my understanding
of the ‘‘reinvention’’ side of the story. Funding for research trips to
the United States in 2002 and 2003 came from the British Academy
and the Royal Society, respectively. Research and writing were com-
pleted during a sabbatical year funded partly by the Leverhulme
Trust.
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Journal of the History of Biology (2005) 38: 461–493 Ó Springer 2005

Primate Language and the Playback Experiment, in 1890 and 1980

Keywords: animal communication, ethology, evolution of language, Garner, Richard,

The Two Lives of an Experiment

In September 1890, a St. Louis newspaper reported the debut of a new

Garner had with him a graphophone – a version of the phonograph –

inaugurated at the Smithsonian in 1890 is now a commonplace in the

Since 1980, there have been countless playback experiments with

Tools and Timing

‘‘Technological determinism’’ is, like ‘‘social Darwinism,’’ a term of

Undoubtedly, the belated improvements in the phonograph’s design

functional characterizations on observations alone, following the pat-

the animals and noticing their responses. It is, in such a circumstance,

Garner’s Primate Playbacks, or, Why 1890?

primitive proto-roots. Far from showing traces of evolution from ani-

strong argument in their favor.’’35 As Garner began to prepare for his

Nevertheless, Darwin’s handling of hierarchy, and in particular his

The Rockefeller Group’s Primate Playbacks, or, Why 1980?

animal communication with anthropocentric preconceptions, they

and recording the vervet monkeys of Amboseli Reserve in Kenya in

uphold old behaviorist taboos about anthropomorphism.55 From around

stated categorically that non-human animals in the wild do not commu-

debates surrounding the work of the psychologists on primate com-

In the midst of this hoopla, a newer group of scientists, in which I

The history of the sciences is the history of certain questions coming to

as an ethologist to criticize psychologists for studying animal behavior

Morgan had announced himself, in 1893, quite prepared to drop his

The primate playback experiment appears, then, to have been

An ancestral version of this paper was presented at seminars in Leeds

of Human Sciences workshop, Fishbein Center, University of

Cheney, D. L. and Seyfarth, R. M. 1980. ‘‘Vocal Recognition in Free-Ranging Vervet

Marler, P. 1978. ‘‘Aﬀective and Symbolic Meaning: Some Zoosemiotic Speculations.’’

Struhsaker, T. T. 1967. ‘‘Auditory Communication among Vervet Monkeys (Cercopi-

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