He was sent to Japan in a normal chimpanzee cage as cargo.
Oliver appeared on Japanese TV with fraudulent promotions picturing him as a miniature yet hairy human being. His next owner was New York Lawyer Michael Miller who promoted Oliver as a missing link. It was Vincent who located Oliver at Buckshire Corporation some 20 years later. Vincent Pace, a concert pianist and friend of the Burgers, tried to purchase Oliver but was outbid. The results are in.and, alas, Oliver is just a standard-issue chimpanzee with a penchant for walking. After years of lively debate, Oliver's DNA was sampled to settle the issue and perhaps provide us with a breathing version of the missing link. He has been touted as a relict australopithecine, a bigfoot, or even the result of a clandestine human-chimp hybridization experiment. Daegling: "Oliver" is a habitually bipedal ape that has captured the imagination of both laypeople and scientists. One odd claim was he did not possess a typical odor common to chimpanzees.Īnthropologist David J. It appears likelier that he was not the clownish performer his chimp peers were, and that their other chimps avoided Oliver.
That Oliver prefers to sexually display to human females over chimpanzee females seems to be an urban legend and a legacy from when he was on The Ed Sullivan Show in the early 1970s, who said "Oliver was sold when he began to express sexual interest in his female owner and other women." ( ). Oliver walks upright and never knucklewalks like his chimpanzee peers. Oliver possesses a flatter face than his fellow chimpanzees as his teeth were removed.
Oliver was acquired as a baby in the early 1970s by trainers Frank and Janet Burger. Karl added further embellishments to it, saying that the zoo-keeper became friends with Ollie because they were in a quiet, unpopular zoo and Ollie appeared lonely.Oliver is a chimpanzee (often called a Humanzee) who was once promoted as a missing link due to his bipedal walk.
Ollie's story was retold on the first series of podcasts. Ricky remained adamant that the show did not offer sufficient proof that Ollie was half-human/half-chimp, but it did have many candid interviews and images supporting Karl's claims that Ollie was attracted to women and smoked cigarettes. However, DNA tests would eventually prove that Ollie was in fact just a regular chimpanzee.Ī Channel 5 documentary based on Oliver's life was discussed on the Xfm show (although Karl phoned in as he was absent due to "illness"). His behavior lead some in the scientific community to wonder whether he was some sort of human-chimpanzee hybrid, and thus he came to be known as a "Humanzee". His trainer, Janet Berger, claimed that Ollie became attracted to her when he reached sexual maturity and tried to mount her on multiple occasions. He is said to display human traits, such as walking on two feet and having a skull that is closer in shape to that of a human. Though Ricky and Steve had apparently never heard of Ollie, he is a fairly well-known chimp, having been the subject of numerous documentaries. The story was very popular with listeners and it inspired Ricky, Steve and Karl to do a regular primate-based feature entitled 'Chimpanzee That,' which would later become 'Monkey News'. Originally told on the 18 January 2003 show of Xfm Series 2, Ricky and Steve were highly skeptical when Karl told them about a monkey named Oliver (which was, in fact, a chimp) that went mysteriously bald, lived in a house with a zoo-keeper and his wife, smoked cigarettes, drank tea, liked to "finish the day off with a bit of brandy", and would eventually "try it on" with the zoo-keeper's wife.