The Truth About Punch's Origin: Kibi, the Brother, and Oran Mama

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:01]On May 31st, >> [music] >> a baby was born.

[00:00:04]Within hours, 30 countries were asking the same thing.

[00:00:08]Not about [music] the baby.

[00:00:10]About Punch.

[00:00:12]Whether Kibi is his mother.

[00:00:17]Kibi.

[00:00:18]The one the community has been calling the beauty queen for months.

[00:00:23]The one who comes to Punch when no one asks her to.

[00:00:28]The one who leaves [music] before anyone can ask what he is to her.

[00:00:34]>> [music] >> Punch has a brother.

[00:00:38]And something else happened.

[00:00:40]Something [music] I still don't know how to tell you. Not because I don't want to.

[00:00:45]Because I haven't found the words for what I saw.

[00:00:48]>> [music] >> Today we talk about all of it. About Kibi.

[00:00:52]About whether she [music] can be Punch's mother. About the mystery of the Ichikawa babies. About what happened.

[00:00:59]And about something [music] this channel has never quite told this way.

[00:01:04]Stay with every word.

[00:01:08]For those of you arriving today, here is who she is.

[00:01:12]Kibi is an adult female in the Ichikawa troop. The community calls her Kibi-chan.

[00:01:17]Some call her beauty queen.

[00:01:20]The zoo has never confirmed her name, her rank, or her relationship to Punch.

[00:01:25]Here is what we can document.

[00:01:28]She settles over him from behind. She grooms him slowly in a way no other female in the troop does.

[00:01:35]And the other macaques step aside when she arrives.

[00:01:39]We cannot confirm Kibi is Punch's biological mother.

[00:01:43]We can only tell you what we see.

[00:01:46]She returns.

[00:01:47]And her body seems to remember something the records never wrote down.

[00:01:53]Now, the eighth baby.

[00:01:56]But to understand it, you first have to understand [music] the mystery.

[00:02:00]In 2024, 11 infants were born on this mountain.

[00:02:04]In 2025, one.

[00:02:08]Punch.

[00:02:09]And he was abandoned.

[00:02:11]11 one eight.

[00:02:16]No one has explained why 2025 was almost a year without babies.

[00:02:21]And no one yet knows whether what is happening in 2026 is the answer to that or something else.

[00:02:28]We'll come back to this.

[00:02:30]Of the eight born this year, the seventh did not survive its first day.

[00:02:35]The eighth was born on May 31st, a Sunday morning.

[00:02:39]The zoo neither confirms nor denies the animal's names.

[00:02:44]If you want to know why, the video is up above. It's called [music] hatred. It's one of the most important things we've ever published. The short version is this.

[00:02:55]The hate came toward Punch's mother, toward the other monkeys.

[00:03:00]And the zoo decided to protect them by closing the door on names.

[00:03:08]The internet, of course, has its own.

[00:03:10]Here is what's circulating with the warning that none of it is official.

[00:03:15]On April 20th, [music] a female the internet calls Sakura-chan, the little red mouse, >> [music] >> daughter of Mimi-chan.

[00:03:25]On April 26th, a male Kaada.

[00:03:29]On May 4th, Jedi.

[00:03:33]On May 6th, Hikari.

[00:03:36]On May 7th, monkey 507.

[00:03:40]No nickname.

[00:03:43]On May 15th, 515, sex [music] unconfirmed.

[00:03:48]On May 22nd, the seventh.

[00:03:51]The internet called her 522.

[00:03:55]>> [music] >> She never saw the next day.

[00:03:59]And on May 31st, [music] a Sunday, the 8th arrived.

[00:04:04]For now, she is only a number, 531. [music] And they say her mother is Kibi.

[00:04:12]Is it really Kibi?

[00:04:14]That remains to be seen.

[00:04:16]The internet found a gold mine and mined it.

[00:04:20]Kibi has a child. Punch has a brother.

[00:04:23]But many people who have followed this story closely for months think it isn't Kibi.

[00:04:28]That it's another female who looks like her.

[00:04:31]That the resemblance deceives.

[00:04:34]We don't know.

[00:04:36]But whether it's her or not, what happened is unheard of in primatology.

[00:04:42]The internet was boiling.

[00:04:44]And not everyone agreed.

[00:04:46]Some said, "It's Kibi. Look how alike they are."

[00:04:50]Others said, "It's not Kibi.

[00:04:52]>> [music] >> It's another female. The resemblance fools you."

[00:04:55]And then came the argument that traveled the furthest, the one that seemed to close the case.

[00:05:01]Japanese macaque females [music] give birth every 2 years.

[00:05:06]Punch was born in July 2025.

[00:05:09]It's impossible for his mother to have another baby this soon.

[00:05:13]It sounds logical.

[00:05:15]It sounds final.

[00:05:18]It's false.

[00:05:20]Here is what the science says.

[00:05:23]And it says it without apology.

[00:05:26]A Japanese macaque female [music] gives birth every 2 years for one reason, nursing.

[00:05:33]While she breastfeeds, her body does not [music] ovulate again.

[00:05:38]That is the break.

[00:05:40]2 years.

[00:05:42]But Punch's mother [music] never nursed.

[00:05:45]The official account is that the day he was born it was 40°.

[00:05:51]That she arrived [music] exhausted.

[00:05:53]That from the very first moment she wanted nothing to do [music] with him.

[00:05:59]She didn't carry him.

[00:06:01]She didn't give him her breast.

[00:06:03]The bond broke [music] on day one.

[00:06:08]And when a Japanese macaque female loses her infant in the first months, the break disappears.

[00:06:16]Her body ovulates again, early.

[00:06:19]In a study of this very species, of the females who lost their newborn, 95% [music] gave birth again the following year.

[00:06:28]Of the ones who raised their baby, only 8% did.

[00:06:34]Read that again.

[00:06:36]A female who raises her baby almost never [music] gives birth the next year.

[00:06:41]A female who loses him almost always does.

[00:06:46]The breeding season for Japanese macaques is autumn. Gestation lasts [music] 6 months.

[00:06:51]If Punch's mother left him in July, her body could have reset that [music] same autumn and given birth in late spring of the following year.

[00:07:01]Late spring of the following year is now.

[00:07:05]This doesn't prove it's Kibibi.

[00:07:08]It doesn't prove Kibibi is Punch's mother.

[00:07:11]The zoo doesn't confirm it and may never.

[00:07:14]All it proves is that the argument half the internet used to [music] say impossible was upside down.

[00:07:23]The ling everyone believed ruled her out is the very thing that would make her possible.

[00:07:32]We stay with what the zoo says.

[00:07:34]And the zoo, [music] for now, says nothing.

[00:07:37]But you did something extraordinary this week.

[00:07:41]You looked.

[00:07:43]Really looked. [music] And sometimes looking that hard all at once from 30 countries is its own form of love.

[00:07:58]And then [music] he came to her.

[00:08:01]The female was sitting with her newborn pressed [music] to her body.

[00:08:06]Punch walked over.

[00:08:09]He sat down beside [music] her.

[00:08:12]And he showed her a ran mama.

[00:08:17]Here I have to be honest with you.

[00:08:19]Because the temptation is to say what we're all thinking.

[00:08:24]That he was introducing [music] her to his mother.

[00:08:28]That he was saying, "Look.

[00:08:30]This one is mine."

[00:08:35]And I can't claim [music] that.

[00:08:37]No one can.

[00:08:40]To put those words inside a macaque's head >> [music] >> is to put ours there instead.

[00:08:46]A ran mama is not a toy.

[00:08:49]In primatology, it's called [music] an attachment object.

[00:08:54]Harlow proved it 70 years ago with this exact [music] species.

[00:08:58]An infant without a mother clings to a cloth doll and prefers it even to the one who feeds her.

[00:09:06]The comfort of a body weighs more than food.

[00:09:12]And the infant uses that object as a base.

[00:09:15]She moves out to explore what's new and when something frightens her, she comes back and grips it.

[00:09:25]A female with a newborn pressed to her chest is exactly that.

[00:09:29]Something new.

[00:09:31]Something charged.

[00:09:34]And Punch did [music] what an infant without a mother does in front of the unknown.

[00:09:39]He reached for Aroun Mama.

[00:09:42]And there is [music] something else.

[00:09:45]At the very edge of what science knows, the gesture of showing something to another.

[00:09:52]Not to ask for it.

[00:09:55]Just so the other looks at it with you.

[00:09:59]In human babies, that gesture [music] appears in the first year of life.

[00:10:03]For decades, it was believed that showing something purely to share it was exclusively human.

[00:10:09]That apes point to request, never to share.

[00:10:14]Until very recently, when it was documented [music] for the first time in a wild chimpanzee in the Kibale Forest in Uganda.

[00:10:29]We don't know if Punch was sharing.

[00:10:32]We don't know if he was introducing.

[00:10:34]We don't know [music] if in his mind, Aroun Mama is a mother, a shield, or both.

[00:10:41]What we know is that a 10-month-old monkey with no mother sat down beside [music] a female who had just become one, and showed her the only thing he has ever had in her place.

[00:10:52]And the line between what he did and what a child would do is so thin that science still doesn't know where to draw it.

[00:11:01]Now, back to the mystery we left open.

[00:11:05]11 infants in 2024, one in 2025, >> [music] >> eight in 2026, one in a whole group.