StTudnoBright

Before Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes came out, I was hooked by the trailer and in response I binged watched the Caesar trilogy and read all the novelisations including the ones that covered the time after Rise and Dawn.

My favourite excerpt out of all of the books was a small excerpt from War for the Planet of the Apes: Revelations where an orang-utan named Ray hears humans singing for the first time.

I really loved how Ray was trying to find things he had heard so far in his life to try and compare it to. It was a tiny part of the story and wasn't part of the plot but it was a sweet little interlude.

Now after seeing Kingdom and learning how important song is to Eagle Clan in order to bond with their eagles, I can't help but be anxious and hope that they hear humans sing too.

Singing and music has been integral to humans regardless of culture throughout our history in order to express joy, hope and excitement to anger and grief.

I don't think apes in the reboot are capable of singing in the same way as humans yet, as the actor of Proximus Caesar, Kevin Durand mentioned in response to a question at the London premiere that his character might keep some humans around to sing him songs. Seen below:

1:00 onwards, Kevin describes making Proximus' voice and from 1:51 is when he mentions Proximus keeping humans to sing.

Considering Proximus has a love/hate relationship with humans, I don't think he'd keep one around to sing if apes were capable of singing in the same way.

Either way I hope there is an opportunity in future films for this to happen. (Not a musical of course :D lol )

Speaking: Apes vs Humans

There can be a scientific reason the franchise could use as to why apes are slowly getting better at speaking and perhaps one day singing. It turns out there's slightly different morphological differences in the larynx (voice box) between apes and humans.

According to this article:

The main difference is that apes have 'small ribbon-like extensions of the vocal cords... called a vocal membrane' and 'ballon-like laryngeal structures called air sacs' . According to the article these structures help some apes and monkeys produce those loud and resonant calls and also helped prevent hyperventilation, while vocal membranes '"...allow other primates to make louder, higher pitched calls than humans - but they make voice breaks and noisy vocal irregularity more common," said evolutionary biologist... W Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna.'

This could explain in part how most of the apes in the Caesar trilogy relied heavily on sign language because despite ALZ-113 affecting their intelligence, it didn't appear to do much for their vocal structures. The exception of course being Caesar, Koba and Bad Ape.

The argument can be made that Koba and Bad Ape learned to speak through sheer effort and strain albeit for different reasons. Despite their efforts however they still had to use shorter words either because they didn't have/know them or they couldn't continue the sound long enough to say them. As a result where a human could speak in longer sentences without pausing, they had to break their sentences up as they couldn't vocalise the longer words and sustain the sentence.

Caesar could be a slight exception. It was shown in War that he can speak in longer sentences with fewer pauses and could probably handle longer words. This may be because he was exposed to ALZ-112 while in utero and any slight physiological changes could have happened to his development before his birth.

Fast forward 300 years to Kingdom's timeline and most apes are speaking similar to how Caesar was in War. Though there are slight differences depending on characters. For Eagle Clan, the apes there do speak clearly and to the point. Only using the words they need to make themselves understood, however there are still pauses in the sentence and there's no noticeably long words. They don't seem to use any words longer than two syllables and if they do use words longer than that, it was uncommon.

While with Proximus, he's trying to walk a line between ape and human, so he's training himself to speak for longer and learning more complicated words though there are rare instances where he still needs to pause now and then while speaking them. For example, while he had no audible problem saying words like 'advancement', 'familiar', 'dangerous' or 'wonderful'. He did sound out the word 'evolution', breaking it down into syllables (this might have been because it was a new one he had recently learned), and when he accused Mae of being 'duplicitous' he had to pause before speaking it out loud (though he was getting quite agitated when he said this and it could have just been emotion).

This could signal that with every generation of apes (at least in this part of the world), their vocal membranes and air sacs (if they have them) are being used less and less and will run the risk of them becoming redundant and likely phased out of their physiology altogether.

The researchers stated in the article above that the loss of these tissues and our larynx evolving to be situated lower in the windpipe than in other primates. were vital to the ability of speech in humans. their loss enabled us to have 'excellent pitch control with long and stable speech sounds,' giving us '... the ability to express thoughts and feelings using articulate sounds.'

In summary it appears that our simplified voice box has allowed us to have more range to not just speak but sing as well.

Author’s Note

Things have been a bit slow lately, so I decided to post the first in a series I’ve been working on. Please be patient with me for the follow ups as living with ADHD and Autism is a bitch when you’re trying to express your ideas. 

Perspective

Since watching all four films, I’ve had questions ricocheting around my mind about the state of the world beyond the west coast of the United States. 

For starters, I find it frustrating at times that humans as a whole in the Planet of the Apes world seem to be underestimated. The humans during the Caesar trilogy were scraping by and the humans in Kingdom are hiding underground but this is a small sampling of the human race as a whole. 

Apologies but California, despite its diverse population, does not represent the entire human species and our full capabilities to survive a pandemic.  

Humans as the modern species we currently are, are around 300,000 years old and our ancestors spent the majority of their time being hunter gatherers. However in the past 50,000 years since the majority of our ancestors left Africa, we rose to populate nearly every continent (except Antarctica) and that was all due to our adaptability. 

Humans evolved on the African plains in a climate that fluctuated every couple of generations. It made our ancestors evolve to be adaptable to rapid change.

Origin of Us Episode 3 - Brains, BBC Two Documentary. Aired - 31st Oct 2011

The first signs of stationary civilisations began to emerge independently around the world in the last 6000-10,000 years. And the beginning of our current modern era only began in the 1800s and for the past 200 years our technology began advancing with every decade that passed. Humans found new inventions to make everyday survival skills aka modern chores easier and quicker. While these were great achievements it made humans more dependent on them and decreased their chances of being able to survive on their own if society were to suddenly collapse beneath them. 

While some populations in the POTA universe may not have been adaptable enough in a post apocalyptic event that doesn’t mean other humans in the world had the same problem as not every country had the same dependency on technology and government services. 

To be clear, I love the storylines and I honestly don’t think it would work if all of a sudden any following movies were moved to a different continent unless one of the characters travels there. However, I think humans' ability to survive and thrive over and over again is being underestimated.

Speculated Death Toll

To start this series we’ll begin with the basics of the damage the Simian Flu did to humans within the first 10 years.

According to the Planet of the Apes wikia page of the Simian Flu Pandemic there is conflicting information on how much of the human population was killed. One says that 99% of the human population were killed (this I believe was sourced from the screen rant website (1)

(2)

Another says 50% due to the disease and the civil unrest that followed.

(2)

From the promotional video it’s stated that 1 in 10 humans survived, revealing that 90% of humans have died.

(2)

And finally from both the wiki and wikipedia page citing the ending video from the film Rise as a source, they’ve stated that 0.2% of humans are immune, meaning 99.8% of humans could be gone.

(2) & (3)

Based on real world statistics, the global human population by July 2016 was 7.5 billion people (7,558,554,526). (4)

Going by the percentage order above, if 99% of humans died from both disease and civil unrest, that’s 7.4 billion fatalities leaving only 75 million people left. Which was the estimated global human population between 1000 - 500 BC. (4)

If 50% of humans died, that’s 3.7 billion people gone and roughly 3.7 billion humans remaining. This was the human population of the world in 1971. (4)

Then if it was 90% of humans killed from the disease then famine and war. That’s 6.8 billion humans gone, leaving 755 million people left. That’s approximately the world population from between 1760 to 1804. (4)

For 99.8%, that would mean 15 million survivors with 7.47 billion fatalities. That places the human population roughly the same as it was in 2000-1000 BC. As mentioned above on the wikipedia page for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, showing that only 0.2% of humans are genetically immune. (4)

Unfortunately, these are conflicting statistics. I don’t know if anything official has come forward and confirmed which one was correct but I think it lends to the credibility of the collapse of modern human civilisation as there would be no intact organisation left to reliably collect this information and if there was any semblance of civilisation left then they would have have to estimate the global loss in isolation.

It's also possible that some humans that weren’t genetically immune managed to escape. There are still highly isolated parts of the world where the infection would be unlikely to reach. Some humans might have seen the pandemic getting worse without relief and other populations may have recent memories of being exposed to other diseases by outsiders so they would have had that recent life lesson still ingrained in their communal memory. So in theory they could have easily decided to disappear into the wilderness or into isolation until the disease had run its course and had no one left to carry it on. This was especially seen during our own recent plague of COVID-19. 

(In later posts in this series, I’ll be going a bit more in depth about this when I cover how I think different areas and people would have reacted.)

Global Ape Population

For chimps, there are around 3,400 captive worldwide and in the wild the estimated population of all sub types (Central, Eastern, Western and Nigeria-Cameroon) is 150,000 to 300,000. (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) & (10)

With Gorillas, combining all the wild sub-species including: Mountain, Western, Eastern lowland and Cross River populations in the wild would add up to approximately 321,300 and 343 gorillas in captivity worldwide. (11) (12) (13) (14) & (15)

Then there’s the orangutans which include the Bornean, Sumatran and the Tapanuli. Altogether there’s an estimate between 55,000 to 104,000 orangutans in the wild with around 200 in captivity in institutions around the world. (16) (17) & (18)

Bonobo’s are estimated to have a population between 10,000 and 50,000 in the wild, however it’s currently unknown how many bonobos there are in captivity worldwide but one can assume it’s less than both Gorillas, Chimps and Orangutans as they’re not a well known great ape. (19) (20) & (21)

Then for the sake of inclusivity of the lesser apes; gibbons and siamangs. There are 20 sub species of gibbon and altogether there are roughly 406,597 in the wild. Siamangs are estimated to be 22,390 in Sumatra. However, it’s unknown how many are in captivity worldwide. (22) (23)

Altogether, all apes worldwide at the start of the Simian Flu would add up to roughly 1.2 million apes, still far less than all the humans tens years after the pandemic started.

In comparison, even factoring civil conflicts and severe famines that followed the Simian flu pandemic, it would still leave the global human population outnumbering all the populations of apes around the world by a massive margin. 

Where Are We?

In this horrific case, the issue of overpopulation would work in humanity’s favour through the sheer scale of how many of us there are. There’s so many of us that even losing 99% of us wouldn’t even render us as a critically endangered species on the IUCN list.

The next most obvious question would be, where are all these people? This is where the vastness of our planet comes into play. It was calculated a few years ago that the then global human population of 7.5 billion when standing shoulder to shoulder could fit in an area of 500 square miles which is roughly the same size as Los Angeles (ironically this is close to where Eagle Clan is set in Kingdom). (24)

This is Los Angeles.

Here it is shown on a California map.

Here is LA compared to the continental USA.

And finally, the world (side note - Greenland, Africa and Canada are out of scale but it proves the point).

(25)

If the entire world population can fit in that one small space before the Simian flu, it stands to reason that the breakdown of modern travel and communication would make tracking down or encountering the remaining human survivors very difficult even if there were 50% of humans left let alone 0.2%.

End of Part 1

Sources

https://screenrant.com/planet-of-the-apes-simian-flu-origin-explained/. (1)

https://planetoftheapes.fandom.com/wiki/Simian_Flu_Pandemic#Speculation (2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_of_the_Planet_of_the_Apes (3)

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ (4)

https://www.ifaw.org/animals/chimpanzees#:~:text=What%20do%20chimpanzees%20eat?,much%20does%20a%20chimpanzee%20weigh? (5)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159116301411#:~:text=As%20the%20opportunity%20to%20breed,rearing%20young%20may%20impact%20welfare. (6)

https://projectchimps.org/chimps/chimps-facts/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Project%20ChimpCare,disappears%20when%20they%20reach%20adolescence. (7)

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/great_apes/chimpanzees (8)

https://www.ifaw.org/animals/chimpanzees (9)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/chimpanzee (10)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/mountain-gorilla (11)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla#:~:text=There%20are%20thought%20to%20be,which%20is%20classified%20as%20Endangered. (12)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/gorilla#:~:text=Males%20mature%20at%20an%20even,to%20Endangered%20in%20November%202018. (13)

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/great_apes/gorillas#:~:text=Population%20&%20distribution,split%20into%20two%20separate%20groups. (14)

https://www.koko.org/conservation/status-of-gorillas-worldwide/#:~:text=Cross%2DRiver%20gorillas%20live%20on,subspecies%20from%20a%20sustainability%20perspective. (15)

https://orangutan.com/how-many-orangutans-are-left/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20species%20of,place%20with%20around%2015%2C000%20individuals. (16)

https://ielc.libguides.com/sdzg/factsheets/orangutans/population#:~:text=Not%20precisely%20known%20(IUCN),2004) (17)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangerment_of_orangutans#:~:text=Billboard%20magazine%2C%201917-,Decline%20of%20population,being%20held%20in%20conservation%20sites. (18)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/bonobo (19)

https://twycrosszoo.org/explore/animals/bonobo/#:~:text=Twycross%20Zoo%20is%20the%20only,ape%20species%20with%20this%20hierarchy. (20)

https://www.bonobo.org/threats (21)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbon (22)

https://animalia.bio/siamang-gibbon#:~:text=Population%20number,to%20be%20around%2022%2C390%20individuals. (23)

Google search '7 billion fit in one city', then select the National Geographic website labelled 'Quiz: Population 7 Billion—Could We All Fit in One City?' (24) - wouldn't let me post with this link attached or even typed.

Birutė Galdikas, the last of “The Trimates” - often referred to as Leakey’s Angels - passed away on 24th March 2026.

Chosen by archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, she was one of three pioneering women tasked with studying great apes in the wild. She would follow Jane Goodall who was studying Chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, and Dian Fossey’s research on mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Virunga Region by devoting her life to understanding the least-studied of the great apes: the Bornean orangutan.

Her decades-long fieldwork became the longest continuous study of a mammal conducted by a single principal investigator, transforming scientific understanding of orangutan behaviour, ecology and conservation. Alongside her students and colleagues, Galdikas helped reveal the complex, solitary nature of orangutans and the immense threat they face.

She co-founded Orangutan Foundation International to raise global awareness about orangutans and the rapid destruction of their rainforest habitat, largely driven by palm oil expansion. She also oversaw the rescue and rehabilitation of many orangutans- most of them young orphans taken from the illegal pet trade.

Birutė Galdikas leaves behind a profound legacy of science, conservation compassion for one of the world’s most endangered great apes.