In 1847 (two years before Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species and a quarter century before The Descent of Man), gorillas enter the western scientific record, in a paper by Thomas Savage and Jeffries Wyman entitled, “Notice of the External Characters and Habits of Troglodytes Gorilla, a New Species of Orang from the Gaboon River,” published in the Boston Journal of Natural History. The bulk of the paper, as suggested by its title, comprises physical descriptions, and the authors go into tedious detail about the various shapes and measurements of their subject animals' bones and skull. Peppered throughout, though, are acknowledgments of and disavowals of African people’s claims and understandings regarding the kinship of “orangs” and humans. Savage and Wyman go out of their way to disclaim what they call “[t]he silly stories about their carrying off women from the native towns,” as well as the “natives’” belief that the “orangs” are in fact “human beings, members of their own race, degenerated. . . The majority,” they aver, “fully believe them to be men, and seem to be unaffected by our arguments in proof of the contrary.” Such stories enter the western popular imagination through such works as Paul du Chaillu’s Adventures and Explorations in Equatorial Africa (1861), and reemerge in twentieth-century popular culture touchstones including Tarzan of the Apes (1914) and King Kong (1933). How might considering how these claims to kinship and Western scientists’ resistance to them help us rethink our own understanding of the relationships of human and non-human primates? How in turn might engaging with the history of these idea’s persistence in popular media lead us to rethink the role of narratives human/non-human intimacies and violence in the Western popular imagination?