Ambam The Adorable Gorilla Wows Crowd By Walking Like A Human

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Considering they're some of our closest relatives, I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised by how much gorillas can do. Yet, the talents shown by a special few of them amaze us nonetheless and help bridge the gap in animal and human relations.

Perhaps the famously accomplished gorilla is Koko, a Western Lowland gorilla living in San Francisco. She was first taught sign language back in the '70s and has only grown more sophisticated since. Nowadays, she can use over 1,000 signs to speak in full sentences, tell jokes, and even rhyme.

In her 44 years on this planet, she's also adopted pet cats and made some celebrity friends that include Leonardo Dicaprio, Isabella Rossellini, Sting, and Robin Williams.

However, as you'll see in the full video, she's not the only gorilla to surprise us with what she can do.

Ambam here is a 24-year-old Silverback gorilla who, as you can see, has figured out to walk upright like a human. Many of us have seen gorillas stand easily enough, but they usually can't achieve the right balance to pull off full-fledged walking. Instead, we often see them drag their knuckles around as they hop on all fours to get around.

As you might imagine, the internet is quite taken with Ambam's swaggering charm as he walks about his British enclosure, but it's hard not to wonder just how he was able to make himself walk.

It turns out there are a couple of possibilities — and they might even both be true.

For one thing, Ambam was born and raised in captivity and had to be taken away from his mother for a few months after falling ill. Anthropologist Kevin Hunt suggested Ambam may have learned to walk by watching the humans around him and trying to copy them.

Of course, he's far from the only gorilla born into captivity, so Hunt also said Ambam could have inherited the trait to walk upright genetically. Considering that Ambam's sister Tamba and her two-year-old son Kabale have also been observed walking, this seems like a likely explanation.

According to zookeepers, Ambam started walking because he's curious about what goes on over his enclosure's walls. He's also figured out that walking upright allows him to carry larger amounts of food around.

Hunt said that Ambam's bipedal growth mirrors our own as we likely grew to stand upright so we could reach fruit hanging from trees.

In any case, the full video is definitely worth watching to see Ambam strut his stuff.

COMMENT and let us know what crazy animal behavior you've seen.

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