Is orangutan ‘stretching out his hand to help a geologist who fell into a mud pool’? Not exactly

A viral 2020 photo showing an orangutan reaching its hand toward a man in a pool of water has resurfaced on social media. 

"The image shows an orangutan, currently under threat of extinction, while stretching out his hand to help a geologist who fell into a mud pool during his search," a caption accompanying a Facebook photo says. The post has been liked more than 45,000 times.

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(Screenshot from Facebook)

The photo was taken in 2020 at the Samboja Lestari orangutan rehabilitation center in Samboja, Indonesia. There, orangutans are rehabilitated in captivity until they are ready to be released in the wild. 

But information from the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, the nonprofit group overseeing the Samboja Lestari rehabilitation center, said the man pictured was neither a geologist, nor had fallen into the mud pool. 

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Photographer Anil Prabhakar took the image and posted it to his Instagram account in 2020 with the caption, "Let me help you?: Once Humanity dying in Mankind, sometime animals are guiding us back to our basics." 

An Instagram video posted in 2020 by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation explains that the man in the viral video is a technician who was clearing sediments and grass, not a geologist. 

The orangutan "very easily could have been asking for food" from the technician since the animal is still dependent on humans, the video says. 

We rate the claim that an image shows an orangutan "stretching out his hand to help a geologist who fell into a mud pool" False.