Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work on the language capabilities of the bonobo Kanzi has intrigued the world because of its far-reaching implications for the evolution of the human language.Kanzi's Primal Language takes the reader behind the scenes of the famous language tests that were performed on Kanzi and featured in popular television documentaries. Showing how Kanzi originally acquired language when he was a young ape - spontaneously in a culture that he shared with humans - this compellingly written book offers important new insights into how culture and language interlace in early childhood.The reader is helped by a novel catalogue of design features of language codifying salient features of Kanzi's language and their concordance with human language.In their penetrating study of how culture shapes first-language acquisition, the authors present a well-founded hypothesis of a gene-culture co evolution of human language, and a thought-provoking discussion of the place of science in human culture.