Nate Rott

Kanzi.

And what made him so famous, what got him full page pictures in Time Magazine and National Geographic, was his ability to communicate with humans using symbols and his comprehension of the English language.

Here's a video National Geographic did of him.

I realize as they talk to Konzi, he understands almost everything they say.

A study published in 1993 found that when Kanzi was eight years old, he could outperform a two-year-old human when given more than 600 spoken instructions.

Chris Krupenia is a cognitive scientist who focuses on animal minds at Johns Hopkins University.

He worked with Kanzi before he died.

Kanzi's ability to point, to answer questions and communicate, made him the ideal candidate for an experiment that Chris wanted to run.

Testing for something that had never been studied in a controlled setting before.

The ability for an ape, or really any non-human animal, to imagine.

But is the ability to imagine as unique to us as we think?

Or can our closest living relatives do it too?

Today on the show, how scientists used a series of pretend tea parties to help answer that question and what their findings potentially say about the evolutionary roots of imagination.

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, so we have an ape with a pretty good grasp of English.

He can answer questions and ask for objects by pointing, much in the way my 14-month-old points at the book Goodnight Gorilla every night, even though we've read it a thousand times and I'm so over it.

I asked Chris Krupenia, the cognitive scientist we heard from earlier,

How the heck do you turn pointing and language comprehension into an experiment that tests for something as intangible as imagination?

And it turns out, Chris says, scientists have been asking human children questions to better understand the imagination for a really long time.

Chris and his co-author Amalia Bastos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St.