ABSTRACT
Tenerife is the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands. It sits fewer than two hundred miles off the coast of West Africa, nearest Morocco. In 1912, at the behest of the neurophysicist Max Rothman, the Prussian Academy of Sciences agreed to establish the Anthropoid Station for the study of the thinking capacity of apes on the island. Rothman, in a paper outlining the conditions that would need to be met for the creation of such a station, proposed Tenerife because it “can be reached in six days from Europe; African anthropomorphs can be transported there without issue straight from Cameroun. Asian anthropomorphs can be transported there fairly easily via Tangier, where large German steamships dock en route to Asia” (Qtd. Ruiz and Sanchez 2014, p. 3). By January the following year, the first director of the project, Eugene Teuber, had arrived on the island, tasked with getting the station up and running. Teuber was not yet 24 years old and still working toward a doctorate, so he agreed only to a one-year position.
