HENRY - The human evolution news relay

Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called “Project Nim.”

Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was attempting to find out if a chimpanzee could learn to communicate using American Sign Language.

“Everyone knows that words are learned one at a time,” but something happens when children begin to combine words and create true language, Terrace says.

The question, he says, was, “Could Nim do this?”