In England, the month of March 1838 brought with it an early-spring chill. At this time at the London Zoo, Jenny the orangutan was quartered inside the Giraffe House, a location heated to a degree appropriate for a tropical ape. Into Jenny’s cage one day walked a man, age twenty-nine and two years back home in England after participating in a naturalist’s dream, a five-year, seagoing scientific expedition during which he observed, studied, and collected specimens of the world’s fauna.

The man, of course, was Charles Darwin. Darwin was, on that spring day, twenty-one years away from publishing a book on evolution, and thirty-three years away from committing to paper his thoughts on human evolution (Zimmer 2007). He was already keenly curious, though, about behavior of nonhuman primates. Darwin “watched Jenny gaze at herself in a mirror. She used bits of straw like tools…. Others might believe they were vastly different from an orangutan, but Darwin didn’t.” In a letter to his sister, Darwin even concluded that Jenny “certainly understood every word” of the zookeeper’s language directed at her (Zimmer 2007, 5).