[Music] In January 1976, news broke of a phenomenon. Pictures showed an upright bald ape called Oliver, who appeared to be a cross between a human and a chimpanzee, what scientists refer to as a human. The existence of Oliver represented the first really tangible bit of of a stensible evidence for a human chimpanzeee hybrid. Oliver's photograph shocked the world. And in the media frenzy that followed, he became an international celebrity. In Japan, scientists investigated his anatomy. And in New York, some journalists described him as the missing link. Others dubbed him Bigfoot. So, who is Oliver? Could he be proof of the unthinkable? A hybrid, halfh human, half chimpanzee? At the time, science could provide no answers. Oliver gradually faded from the spotlight and eventually disappeared. Now 30 years on, he has been found still alive. And with the latest DNA profiling, we can finally solve the mystery of the human. This is Oliver. He's baffled science for the last 30 years. He's a great mystery. No one's ever been able to explain why he is different. Something is in there more than an animal. To be in his presence, he's just strange. He's different. What first drew the public and the scientists to Oliver was his bizarre appearance and behavior. Psychology professor Gordon Gallup from the State University of New York in Albany will never forget the first time he set eyes on Oliver. [Music] I thought Oliver might be a human. Oliver had some very peculiar morphological characteristics, facial characteristics that looked surprisingly humanlike to me. To look at, Oliver is certainly no ordinary chimpanzeee. His head is bald and smaller than normal chimps. His jaw is not as pronounced as you'd expect, and his ears are pointed rather than rounded. His scent is different, and other chimpanzees want nothing to do with him. But it's his habit of always walking upright, something that normal chimpanzees just don't do, that made the scientists sit up and take notice. He'd been brought over from Africa as a baby in 1960 by animal trainer Frank Ber and spent the first 16 years of his life with the Burger family at their home in Blackwood, New Jersey. Frank died a few years ago, but his widow, Janet, still trains chimpanzees to appear in films and television commercials. Her latest charge, Chippy, is no stranger to the camera. Say good morning, Frank. When he was younger, my husband, he was a a guide up in the Congo. His brother sent over three chimps. Well, two were chimps and one was Oliver. Oliver turned out to be very different from Chippy or any other chimp she'd ever come across. When Oliver was about, I'd say about four or five months old, he just one day stood up and he was always up. Very, very seldomly ever put his knuckles on the ground. If he walked like a half a block, he would walk upright. This guy, if you walk a half a block towards the end, he's can't make it, you know. Come here, Chip. Chip, come here, son. Come on, Chippy. Stand up. Up. Come on. Walk. Come on. Up. Up. Up. Up. Because of the way their hips are made, most chimpanzees can only walk upright when coaxed like this, and then only for short periods of time. Unlike Oliver, Chippy soon reverts to walking on all fours. Janet and Frank Burgerer found the upright Oliver wasn't very good for business as their other performing chimps shunned him. It didn't seem to bother Oliver as he preferred the company of humans anyway. But he used to come in the house and uh sit down, watch television, smoke a cigar, you know. You could give him chores. You'd say uh put hay in the wheelbar and and take it over there and he'd look where you point. He would take it over there. A chimpanzeee. Turn him loose. Give him a wheelbarrow. He's gone. He's up a tree somewhere. You know, Oliver didn't behave like this to get any kind of reward. According to Janet, he simply wanted to do what humans do. See, this is what a chimp does. Now, Oliver wouldn't do that. Oliver was like a little person. and he knew how to wash his hands and and uh here chip. That's a typical chimp. Look who's up here. Look who's up there. Who's that guy? As Oliver reached sexual maturity, it wasn't simply being housetrained that singled him out from the other chimps. He'd begun to develop an interest in Janet Burger. You know, I always thought he was a cross between a human and a and a and a chimp. I really I did the way he acted. I've been around chimps all my life and he was altogether different and his problem was when he was 16 then he wanted to make love to women you know he'd get a hold of you couldn't get away from I don't help prank he didn't bite or nothing just going to hug me and kiss me and and uh and whatever you know Oliver was becoming a real problem Janet started looking for someone who could take him off her hands don't put your face on it ah don't lick it professional pianist Vincent Pace was a friend of the Burgers and had known Oliver for years. He was aware that Oliver's sexual advances towards Janet were becoming serious and that something had to be done. She went in this particular day and he became aggressive and he turned her around quickly, put her head down, bent her over, and he mounted her. It was the last straw for Janet. Vincent Pace considered buying Oliver and invited his mother along to meet this possible new addition to the family. Her reaction was typical of a first encounter with this unnerving creature. He walked out down the hallway exactly the way he walked the day I had seen him, shoulders back, erect, very aware, and he walked directly over the table and she yelled out, "Oh my God," she says. Get him away from me. To get to the bottom of what makes Oliver so disturbingly different, we need to delve deeper into his origins. Oliver comes from a part of central Africa where traditionally some people live in close proximity with our ape cousins. In this remote village, several chimps are kept as household pets, although their status within the family is very low. It's thought that up to 78,000 chimpanzees live in the wild in this part of the world. Could Oliver be the offspring of some unspeakable union between human and chimp? Could this account for Oliver's strange humanlike behavior and appearance? With chimps living so closely to humans, such a union, while highly unlikely, is not beyond the bounds of possibility. [Music] I thought that he had been crossed with a human being. I thought somehow somewhere someone had uh played a very dirty trick and this was the remains, so to speak. uh to this day I believe that there's something in there that makes him human. If that's true then we need to ask is it scientifically possible for two different species to produce a hybrid offspring? Are there any precedents in nature for such a creature? Come here. Hello Dr. Bagavan Anel runs the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He successfully combined two species to produce hybrid offspring called ligers. The laws of nature apply to big cats as well as primates. Genetically, ligers are 50% tiger and 50% lion. Here on my right, we have a fangled tiger. She's about a year and a half old, and she's got that bold black and orange striping. And then on my left we have a young lion about the same year and a half old who you can see has a much more tawny pale coat. And obviously the mix of the two right here with the shadow striping and his bold markings show us the liger. He's a liger because his father is a lion, his mother a tiger. That's the baby. Now meet the adult. If you haven't come across a fully grown liger before, then this is the largest cat you're ever likely to see. Come here, Samson. [Music] H down. Down. It's theorized that ligers are this enormous size because the inhibitor growth gene exists in the female lion and in the male tiger. So when you switch around and you get a male lion breeding with a female tiger creating the liger, you get this gigantic size. Nothing tells it when to stop. In the wild, this enormous size wouldn't necessarily be of any advantage because it would require so much more food. Samson here can readily eat 25 pounds of food in a sitting where an adult lion can subside on 7 to 10 lbs of food. The territories of a lion and tiger don't overlap in the wild. If a tiger did meet up with a pride of lions, it's more likely to end up in a fight than romance. So, captive breeding is the only way to produce what is the largest cat in the world. Sam, come here. There it is. Up, up, up, up, up, up. There it is. Up. Height. Height. Get close to him. Liars show traits common to both parents. Get close to him. For instance, tigers love to get wet, but lions can't stand the water. Samson got his water loving genes from the tiger side of the family. The liger is living proof that two species who would never meet up in the wild can mate and produce offspring. It works for cats. But how alike are primates? To find out the answer, scientists measured how well bonded human DNA is when compared to a mix of human and chimp DNA. If you take one strand of human DNA and heat it, the double helix splits into two separate single strands. When heated, chimp DNA will unravel in the same way. When cooled, a human strand will always seek to pair up with another human strand, the chemical links matching up like the rungs in a ladder, forming a strong bond. Swamping human DNA with chimp DNA will eventually see both strands pairing up, although the chemical bonds are not so strong. Measuring this difference in strength between human DNA and hybrid DNA reveals how genetically different humans are to other species. When looking at such differences in DNA, it's clear the closest relative to humans is the chimpanzeee. we share at least 99% of our basic biochemistry uh in common with each other and I would be surprised therefore if humans and chimpanzees couldn't hybridize. The real question however is if humans and chimpanzees did hybridize would those hybrids be reproductively viable? Hybrid animals such as the liger are usually sterile because sterility is nature's way of preventing different species from crossbreeding. For example, if you cross horses and donkeys, which are different species, you get hybrids called mules. And mules are almost always sterile. [Music] If a human chimp hybrid were fertile, it would mean humans and chimpanzees are members of the same species, forcing us to reexamine the whole idea of what it means to be human. It's not possible to say if Oliver is fertile, as he's never been attracted to female chimpanzees, and as a consequence has never mated. Back in 1976, when Janet Burgerer was looking to sell the overamorous Oliver, his picture appeared in a magazine. It caught the attention of a New York attorney. So fascinated was he by the creature in the article that he just had to go and see Oliver in person. Michael Miller knows all about the law, but he wasn't quite sure what to expect from a chimp that walks upright. I'm waiting for him to come in the room. I'm actually nervous." And then I said, "Uh, can we see Oliver?" And they took me out into the barn. I sat down in a chair just like I am now. And uh, Mr. Burgerer went into the other room, came back, and there was Oliver on a tether. And I was blown away. I don't even know how to I don't have words to describe how I felt. At that first meeting, Michael Miller took these pictures. What he saw that day convinced him to buy Oliver there and then, but he had competition. I was in the process of purchasing them and uh someone outbid me, a lawyer from New York City who had other ideas for him, outbid me by $6,000. And even though the burgers and I were very close, I couldn't come up with the money at that time. And uh they sold him to Michael Miller. I was heartbroken. Absolutely heartbroken. It would be 20 years before their paths would cross again. But Vincent Pace would eventually come to play a crucial role in Oliver's life. Michael Miller bought Oliver for $8,000. He knew nothing about keeping chimps, so he asked Oliver's previous owner, Frank Burgerer, to look after him. After all, he couldn't take him home to Manhattan. What would the neighbors say? Well, they thought I was crazy. I mean, they everybody I knew thought I was crazy. Uh they hadn't seen them and so I just said, you know, I just bought this ape. It's the strangest thing I ever saw. He walked up right and it's that's nice. But Manhattan attorney owns Bigfoot was not a story he was going to be able to keep to himself for long. Soon a journalist sensing a scoop came knocking at his door. And he said, "Look, I want the exclusive story and I want a photograph or I'm going to put it out on the UPI wire and you're going to have everybody in the world coming to your door." Michael Miller thought he was bluffing. By the next morning, he was forced to change his mind. I got to my office. Uh, I couldn't get into the building. I literally couldn't get into the building. I said, "What's it about?" And they said, "There's an attorney has Bigfoot." And I could feel my heart go down into my knees. I was really scared. Soon headlines were asking the question, "Is he a Bigfoot or has science created a Frankenstein monster?" Oliver we know came from the wild and back in the mid70s biotechnology was in its infancy. However, in just two decades, cloning and animal hybridization would become a reality. Predicting controversial scientific breakthroughs is the job of Dr. Patrick Dixon from a high-tech laboratory in London. He advises companies on what's going to happen in the future. I met a scientist in the 1980s in the UK who claimed even then that he was attempting to clone human embryos um to implant them into monkeys using them as surrogates in order to grow the fetus to a point where he could cull it for spare parts. That was many years ago over 15 years ago. He has yet to go public on the work that he did. While such research has never seen the light of day, the concept of using one species for the benefit of another is nothing new. Worcester, Massachusetts is home to advanced cell technology. In 1998, Dr. Jose Cibelli announced a scientific breakthrough that shocked the world. He took a cow egg, removed its DNA, and inserted his own DNA. The genes activated and the egg began to divide. It was on its way to becoming a human clone of Dr. Sibelli. However, the cow egg still contained what's called boine mitochondrial DNA, the powerhouse of every cell in the body. [Music] The controversy with this experiment was that when we emptied out the cow egg, there was still DNA left in the cell, the mitochondrial DNA. And that got people to be very concerned. There were all these jokes that we were creating cow boys. If this human clone had been able to develop beyond a cluster of cells, it theoretically could have turned into what looked like a human being. Technically, it would have been 99% Dr. Sabelli's twin brother and 1% [Music] cow. This is an example of cloning, not hybridization, but it demonstrates how far science has progressed. In fact, the technology needed to create a human chimp hybrid has been around for at least 10 years. It is absolutely inevitable that some scientists somewhere sometime will make a hybrid of a monkey and a human. It may already have happened. American newspaper reports tell of an experiment in China to fertilize a chimpanzee with human sperm as far back as 1967. It's alleged the chimp was 3 months pregnant when cultural revolutionary rioters smashed up the laboratory. It's said the pregnant chimp died of neglect. [Music] However, China isn't the only country where such experiments are alleged to have taken place. According to psychology professor Gordon Gallup, it also happened in the United States. Only this time, a live baby was the result. Well, there there there's this rumor, long-standing rumor that back in the 1920s at the original Yorks Primate Center in Orange Park, Florida, there was an attempt to artificially inseminate a female chimpanzee with human semen from an obviously undisclosed donor. And according to the rumor, not only did conception occur, but the pregnancy went fullterm and it gave rise to a live birth. And within several days after the birth of this infant, the decision was made to euthanize the baby and not go public with the results. I had a former professor who was at the Yorks Primate Center at that time and he confided in me that in fact it did happen. That doesn't make it true, but he was a very credible source. Professor Gallup won't name this source and the Yorks Institute deny it happened. But for such stories to circulate, it highlights our strange preoccupation with the idea of creating a human. A creature that is part human, part chimpanzeee. When I first saw Oliver's picture back in 1976, I thought Oliver might be a human. The some of his facial characteristics were peculiarly like those of a human. and I attempted to follow up on the Oliver story and have done so ever since. So, what might a cross between a human and a chimp look like? The appearance of other hybrids such as the liger suggests the offspring would inherit features common to both parents, as this artist's impression shows. However, the answer is we won't know for sure until such a creature is confirmed. It was these disturbingly human features that was to capture the world's attention and catapult Oliver to celebrity status. By the spring of 1976, Oliver was hot property. Owned by Michael Miller, but still handled by his old trainer, Frank Burgerer, he was invited to be the star attraction at the Explorers Club annual banquet in New York City. He created a sensation. The curtain opened and Frank Burgerer came out with Oliver uh walking him on a chain tether and walked him back and forth and it was absolutely dead silent in the uh the ballroom. As you can see, his head is rather small for proportionate and not proportionate with his body. It's approximately 2/3 the size it ought to be. Mr. Burger, could you run him once again just so people can see that? Okay, thank you very much. The Explorers Club was the start of a whirlwind career. Oliver was invited to appear on a television special in Japan. Michael Miller agreed as long as it was to be a serious scientific program with the aim of unlocking the mystery of Oliver. Japan was interesting. That was a a that was a tradeoff of scientific versus entertainment. The gentleman who promoted the notion of a network special knew that we uh as a group had an interest in the scientific investigation of Oliver and didn't have the funds to do it. Before Oliver had even set foot in Japan, Michael Miller discovered that trade-off was likely to be more entertainment than science. [Music] As Oliver boarded the flight, the Japanese film crew set the tone for much of what was to [Music] follow. They they did some footage of him sitting in a chair as if that's the way he flew over there. Quite frankly, it irked me because I didn't realize they had shot that footage. And so when I looked at television, there is Oliver sitting in a in a seat being waited on by a stewardist. That wasn't the way it happened. He was in his cage packed as um as baggage. When he arrived in Japan, the media were out in force to see him. For 3 weeks, Michael Miller and Oliver toured the country. The camera crew was keen to capture the celebrity chimp and his supposedly celebrity lifestyle. It was obviously well known that there were these people from America traveling around with this strange creature. The word had gotten out. They were put up in traditional Japanese ins where Oliver was dressed in a kimono. Again, all for the benefit of the cameras. By now, the whole country was talking about this mystery [Music] ape. For the TV show, Oliver underwent a battery of scientific investigations. The results were presented on this television special called Oliver, Man or Ape. It's said that 26 million viewers tuned in to find out the answer. Hello. Be nice. Okay. Contributing to the debate were members of the 1960s pop group, The Monkeys. I'm very interested to find out exactly what he is. We're here because we are also monkeys. Of course, the one thing Oliver was never confused with being was a monkey. In coming to Japan, Michael Miller had been promised hard scientific evidence to explain the phenomenon of Oliver. Eventually, the program moved on from the showbiz and presented its findings. One scientist did a test looking at Oliver's center of gravity, which apparently concluded that he was more human than chimp. But such tests could not answer the fundamental question. Was he a human chimpanzeee hybrid? To do that, he had to be sedated, his blood taken, and his chromosomes counted. At last, Michael Miller was going to find out if Oliver really was a human. Or so he thought. My remembrance is that there were 47 chromosomes that they found and that the humans have 46 and the ape has 48 and that would put them right in the middle. The TV show seemed to imply that the results were far from conclusive. Of the 40 cells analyzed, 38 came back saying Oliver was a chimp, but two cells showed 47 chromosomes, one more than a human and one less than a chimp. In effect, a hybrid. Japanese doctors attributed the discrepancy to human error. Far from resolving the mystery, the TV show had simply helped hype it to fever pitch. But there was worse to come. and I went to a press conference and as a result of which certain things were said that caused me to start a lawsuit. It was reported that a Japanese actress had agreed to have sexual intercourse with Oliver and that the event would be televised in the interests of science. Apparently, somebody at that press conference said that while we were there, Oliver would mate with a human being. That that's the the story. That's the actress that said that she was going to do it. But it was obviously to get and she did get quite good publicity for her career. And obviously, I would never do that or condone that. And this is part of what distressed me that I had to constantly watch out for these things. And I never caught it before it was published. When it was published, I sued He got a published apology, but by now Michael Miller had had enough of the media spotlight. The truth is I in a way I regret ever having met with him because once I had met with him, it was destiny that I had to part with him. I'm I'm an attorney. I can't I couldn't keep him. It wasn't practical. So the inevitable departure was on the uh on the calendar, so to speak. Michael Miller and Oliver parted company amid accusations of exploitation. My guess is that originally the attempt was to use Oliver as as something that could be put on display that they could then in turn market for commercial purposes. If anybody were to allege that I took advantage of them to make money, they'd be incorrect. uh I didn't make money. It cost me money to have this venture. But I will admit that my motive was very personal in so far as I wanted to partake in an important discovery that was important to me. If it's found that he is halfhuman, would that merely be a scientific curiosity or could it fundamentally alter the way we see ourselves? It could be an example of what scientists call basic research, but it would have profound implications for human evolution and our relationship to other species. It might suggest, for example, that humans and great apes, in spite of their apparent differences, are much more closely related at the level of their basic biochemistry than hereto for anybody had ever imagined. It was thought that using tools was one of the things which distinguished humans from animals. We now know that chimps routinely use tools to find food. Fishing for termites, a nutrient-rich delicacy, requires skill and patience. We have even discovered that chimpanzees appear to have a form of culture. Culture can be thought of as traditions that are passed down by example rather than instinctively inherited. For example, in one part of Africa, chimps traditionally use a stone to crack nuts, whereas in another area, they'll use wood, even though stones are available. The basics of culture, crude though they are, are being seen at work. I remember the first time I met him, he walked over to me to shake my hand. Now, I figured, okay, that may be training, but when he went to shake my hand, he grabbed me at my elbow. And so unless somebody took the trouble to train him to shake hands in a warm manner and it's one thing to just extend your hand, it's another thing to extend your hand and give a warm welcome. Uh I found those things very strange. The culture of a human reflected in an ape. It's the stuff of science fiction. But perhaps creating a planet of the apes type of being is not as far-fetched as it sounds. This scientist has applied for a patent on a creature that would be part human and part chimpanzeee. A bizarre life form that no one has made before, but which might prove useful for medical experiments in the future. His application was turned down, but Stuart Newman is celebrating. [Music] The New York Medical College biology professor never intended to make the human chimp hybrids. He applied for the patent so he could challenge American law which allows patents on living beings. We objected as as many people do to uh uh the privatization of the whole living world and uh we were actually interested in seeing whether they would allow a patent that was for partly human organism. And if they did, then uh it would raise an alert throughout u society that uh this was kind of getting too close to home. The patent office ruled that his invention was too human to be patentable. Undaunted, Professor Newman has filed an appeal which he hopes will force a rethink on the policy of allowing patents on living beings. I feel rather that um it's it's important for working scientists to be the ones who also warn about the consequences of taking the science too far. We need rules, regulations and and a public consciousness about it. It all serves to raise deep moral and religious dilemmas. Perhaps it raises the biggest question of them all. I asked a judge this question. I said, "How many human genes would you have to give a monkey in order for that monkey to be able to win human rights in a court of law?" He said, "If this monkey is more than 50% human genetically, I would prosecute it for murder." I said, "Did you know that the monkey is already 98% human because we are close cousins?" In that case, he said, if you put the right 1.1% of the human genes into a monkey, that monkey will be more human than animal in a court of law. Oliver's friends believe there's something about him that's eerily human. There's somebody in there. There's someone in there with a heart, a soul who feels. You can see it through his eyes. You can feel it when he's when you're in his presence. And that's that's the truth. I've always felt it. And everyone that has ever come in contact with him has the same exact feeling. Something is in there more than an animal. If Oliver does turn out to be more than just an animal, it raises many questions with no easy answers. What would you do with the hybrid? Would the hybrid be maintained in a cage? Would the hybrid be given human rights? um what are the implications that this would have for how we treat chimpanzees? Can we justify continuing to do research on chimpanzees if in fact humans and chimpanzees can interbreed? So it has profound u moral, ethical, social, religious, political implications for how we think about ourselves in relationship to other species. I think the issue of who Oliver is and particularly in relationship to half human half ape and those issues raises the basic fundamental question that we all have of who are we. Anything that raises that question will be fascinating to us. Michael Miller donated Oliver to a wild animal park in California. When that went out of business, Oliver bounced from trainer to trainer and disappeared. There were rumors that he was in a circus. Others thought he'd been sold off for medical research. But the man who had tried to buy Oliver had never forgotten him. I lost total track of him. It wasn't until many years later, like 20 years later, that uh I came into some money and the first thought on my mind was I'm going to find Oliver. But Oliver had been missing for a very long time and the trail had gone cold. Then, just when he was about to give up, Vincent got a break. I called everyone I knew and everyone I didn't know, and I did finally track him down. He was only 2 and 1/2 hours away from I was living at the time. What Vincent discovered shocked him. Oliver had ended up in a research laboratory in Pennsylvania. There, he'd languished in a 5tx 7 ft cage for nine long years. I had found him at the Buckshshire Institute. They have a lot of chimpanzees and they're used for experiments and I was totally opposed to that. So, I called a friend of mine in uh San Antonio, Texas. Wally Sweat runs an animal sanctuary called Primarily Primates and he offered to help. Fortunately, Oliver had never been used in any experiments, and in 1996, the Buckshshire Corporation agreed to hand over Oliver and 11 other chimpanzees to Wall-E. After 9 years in a tiny cage, Oliver might be expected to come crawling in on all fours. But dramatically, he walked in on two legs. Hi, Ollie. Wow, you stand up. Look at you. Wally Sweat had heard stories about an ape that walked on two legs. As he looked at the creature standing upright in front of him, it was obvious that this was the same legendary animal. I noticed that his head was smaller than other chimpanzees, his ears set higher on the head and more pointed, and his nose more flat than a normal chimpanzeee. So at that point when he uh especially when he started to walk upright, I realized that this was the very same mystery ape that no one had been able to contact. While some people believe he's half human, half chimp, others think he's just a clever chimp who's been taught to walk upright. Wally Sweat is adamant about one thing. I absolutely disagree with anyone who says that Oliver was trained to walk upright. The chimpanzees that we've housed here walk bent over and with their knees bent. Oliver's stance when he walks is with his shoulders back and his knees locked. And there's never ever been a chimpenzee trained to walk that has been able to keep that pose. The day they moved to their new home from the research lab, Oliver and his companions made a little bit of history. The significance of this enclosure is great. This effort represents the first time the chimpanzees were ever retired to a sanctuary from a laboratory. I'm quite excited that these chimps that lived in a basement in 5-ft cages now can live in groups and experience the outdoors and be in the Texas sun and actually experience some quality of life. They all Where's the red? Straight on. You're so bad. You are so bad. Primarily Primates is home to some 1,000 rescued or donated animals. It's not open to the public and relies on donations to make the retirement years of Oliver and all the other animals here as peaceful as possible. But some of the residents are only just starting out on life. What we're going to be doing here is introduce these two young chimps, both born at laboratories, with the ideal opportunity never to be used in medical research. And I'm going to introduce them now that they're used to being outside in the weather and used to each other to an area that's more naturalistic, larger, and with other chimpanzees. I certainly don't want to sedate these young animals to move them. So, we're going to see how it goes. Come, Miss Jewel. Come on, sweet girl. All right. Here we go. I'll go for a walk. Don't be scared. Here we go. Grass. I like this. Up to now, home has been a small cage with a concrete floor. So, this is a whole new experience for these infants. For Wall-E, it's a lifetime commitment. Both babies could easily live as long as Oliver. At the grand old age of 42, Oliver has lost his eyesight. And because of arthritis, he no longer walks upright. But still, the mystery remains. For more than three decades, he's been the center of speculation and rumor. Is he halfhuman, or could he be a new species as yet unknown? Wall-E has always believed Oliver is special. And so finally he decided to put an end to the debate once and for all. At last the world would know who or what Oliver really was. I would like while Oliver is still alive to find someone who would be willing to really look into the differences. He's a very unique creature and he won't be with us forever. [Music] To answer the question, a sample of Oliver's blood was taken. DNA experts were asked to conduct the most extensive genetic studies ever undertaken with Oliver. At last, his true identity would be revealed. How did the uh DNA concentrations come out? Were you able to get adequate DNA for your experiments? Yes, these three are the purified mitochondria DNA and the we did chromosome testing on Oliver to determine his specy identity and whether or not he was a hybrid. The reason for this is because humans have 46 chromosomes. Chimpanzees normally have 48 chromosomes and in fact the chromosome testing results demonstrated Oliver had 48 chromosomes, the normal complement for a chimpanzee. Therefore, Oliver is a chimpanzeee. Oliver is not a human chimp hybrid after all. But could there be a genetic reason to explain his humanlike behavior and appearance? Dr. Elely and his team delved deeper into Oliver's genetic makeup to see if they could find anything unusual. What they discovered surprised them. Well, what we have here is the original uh X-ray photograph of Oliver's mitochondrial DNA sequence, and we've compared that to a a control chimpanzeee. And if we take a closer look at at this sequence, what we see overall is that Oliver is different from your common chimpanzeee from West Africa. So, for example, if we look at this part of the gel in the control chimpanzeee, there's kind of a step effect here, here, here. If we compare that to Oliver, you can see that his DNA sequence looks completely different than the control chimpanzeee. The most in-depth genetic studies ever undertaken with Oliver have revealed that while still being a chimpanzeee, he is different. Uh Oliver would belong uh appears to belong to a a subop of uh chimpanzees that derive from central Africa that represents about maybe 2% of the domestic population of chimpanzees in the United States. It's clear he's a very rare type of chimpanzee who belongs to the depths of the Congo jungle. We know he's not a human chimp cross, but could he be an example of a subspecies as yet unknown? He he is a very peculiar chimp. I suspect he's a a mutant chimpanzeee of sorts, but there's certainly no evidence at this point given the genetic data that Oliver is a human chimpanzeee cross. That Oliver is a human. Come here. Come on, Oliver. While we are now certain that Oliver is ape, not human, the question of what kind of ape he is remains. One theory is that Oliver could be a kind of living fossil. Up here. Up here. 10 million years ago, more than 50 different species of ape roamed the planet. It really was a planet of the apes. Yet 3 million years later, most had disappeared to be replaced by human beings. What helped us make this giant leap from ape to human seems to be the ability to walk on two legs. This was the key event that set us on the path to becoming what we are today. So, could Oliver be a relic from that period? An ancient link from the transitional era that saw ape become man. We might find that there is a unique race of chimpanzees somewhere in the wild that has been so far undiscovered. Or we might be able to find out why the behavior, the scent, rejection of other chimps makes Oliver different until we find another Oliver-like creature to compare him to. He'll continue to be a mystery. Today, Oliver is an old gentleman seeing out his days in the Texas sun. His home, primarily primates, has been offering a refuge to all kinds of animals since 1978, but specializes in apes. Because it's not run for profit, it can be tough to keep going. Wallally's trying to raise enough money to build Oliver a new enclosure at the moment because he's not able to fend for himself. What do you think about creating another area that would encompass this whole place over here, but not too high? Yes. where he could fall. Probably lots of different things we could do to keep it safe. We certainly want him to be visible and be able to see the others. Wall-ally believes Oliver is important. He may be a new subspecies, perhaps the only known example of his kind. I'm still totally convinced that there's a mystery about Oliver. He's different. He's a creature who's part of the unknown. Oliver is not a hybrid, but the knowledge to produce such a creature is already here. What's stopping the scientists is not so much technology, but morality. And traditionally, that doesn't tend to have a long shelf life. The lesson of history is that whatever can be done will be done somewhere sometime by someone. Oliver's life story has been fascinating, but the price he's had to pay has been high. Today he's in a good facility with people who care about him. But it hasn't always been like this. This can be a very cruel world for something that's different. And when you're different from absolutely everything else that's known, it's going to be a very difficult life for you. And he's proof of that. A halfh human, half chimpanzeee creature brought into the world by humans would be um in a in a horrible state. and uh forever in misery and limbo. I'm uh very relieved that Oliver is not part human. There's never been an animal like him. And despite delving deep into his genetic makeup, Oliver is still holding on to the secret of what makes him look and act so human. [Music]