Sad news from the US, where Washoe the talking chimpanzee has died. She passed away peacefully on Tuesday, aged 42, in a facility at the Central Washington University, where she had spent her final years. The website friendsofwashoe.org says a memorial service is planned later this month. Donations in lieu of flowers, please, writes Frank McNally.
Washoe did not talk in the conventional sense, of course. Before she was born experiments had already concluded that chimps lacked the vocal apparatus to reproduce human sounds. Instead, her pioneering work was in the area of sign language.
At the height of her career, she was credited with a vocabulary of 250 words.
She also had an ability to combine them in multiple short sentences; although, to the end, critics questioned whether any of this constituted language in the true sense.
Excitement peaked in the late 1960s when Washoe was the focus of a formal experiment in the Nevada county after which she was named. The idea was simple: to teach her American Sign Language (ASL), as used by deaf people in the US.
As a toddler, the chimp learned to request rewards - including tickles - by making the sign for "more". From there she made rapid progress. She could be truculent if pushed too hard: occasionally expressing frustration, as any student might, by biting the teacher. But her vocabulary soon extended even to swear-words: or at least to adding the adjective "dirty" to the names of people she didn't like.
By the age of four, she knew 132 words. Not impressive compared with the 3,000 you can expect from a four-year-old human, but excellent for a chimp. She could also form at least 30 two and three-word combinations. A high-point of the study occurred when, shown a swan and asked what it was, she made the sign for "water bird". One researcher described the excitement of the moment as "like getting an SOS from outer space".
But there were sceptics. A few years after the initial experiment, a Columbia University researcher conducted his own tests with a subject named - in a backhanded compliment to a certain famous linguist - Nim Chimpsky. He concluded that both Chimpsky and Washoe were engaging in mimicry rather than real conversation: that essentially they had developed an elaborate way to beg for food.
The doubters were supported by the fact that Washoe had a poor grasp of grammar. Although she used some word combinations in the right order consistently - for example "tickle me" rather than "me tickle" - she was quite indifferent about other sequences.
One thing she was very particular about, however, was footwear. "She always checked out your shoes, and if you had new ones she'd sign for you to show them to her," a spokeswoman at CWU recalled this week. "Then she might sign something about the colour. She was a real shoe lady in that way."
Which suggests that perhaps researchers were barking up the wrong tree with the language thing.
Washoe might have been the focus of an even more interesting project on the intense relationship that females of certain advanced mammal species have with footwear, especially the expensive kind. The urge involved is clearly very primal. But if we understood more about it, maybe scientists could work on a cure.
The demise of Washoe reminds me that while the primate world may not yet have cracked language, it has made great strides in other creative disciplines: modern art, for example, where admittedly the bar may be a bit lower. You might recall that only two years ago, a collection of posthumous paintings by a chimp called Congo fetched more than £12,000 sterling at Bonham's auction rooms in London. The price was a multiple of the pre-show estimate.
Dubbed the "Cézanne of the ape world", Congo was born in 1954 and although based in London - an artistic backwater at that time - his career paralleled that of the abstract expressionists, with whom he attracted inevitable comparisons. Certainly his paintings were abstract. And as a chimp, he arguably had an edge over his human contemporaries in achieving the spontaneity that abstract expressionism so prized.
Most of Congo's output happened during a short but intensely creative period during the late 1950s. His supervisors were first impressed just by his confident handling of paintbrushes and pencils, and the fact that he made no attempt to eat them.
But soon they were struck by the care he took with his work.
He always stayed within the boundaries of his canvas. And, unlike many painters, he always knew when he was finished: laying down his brush and never returning to a picture he'd done earlier.
As well as the expressionists, his oeuvre seemed to owe something to the Fauves (literally "wild beasts"), another 20th century art movement.
Unfortunately, he never gave any interviews - even in sign language - so we don't know what he was thinking.
Like many artists, Congo died young: struck down in his prime at the age of 10. Had he enjoyed a longer career, it is interesting to speculate whether he would have continued to insist on the primacy of paint as an expressive medium, or branched into the installation work so beloved of the "Brit-art" movement. I like to think that, had he lived, the Turner Prize would not have been beyond him.