Thread: Counting Monkeys (Ape..)

Primate researchers in Japan have answered one of biology's most burning questions - are chimps cleverer than students.



I have seen even more astounding feats from chimpanzees, we have yet much to learn about animal intelligence.

Pretty fascinating. What makes me wonder most is why such a thing was selected against in human evolution... it suggests something profound about the way the brain works, to me; namely that you can only have a certain 'amount' of brain power which has to be distributed to different functions, so if you increase creative thought, for instance, you decrease the kind of intelligence shown above.

Yeah, but the university students weren't getting treats when they got it right!

Originally Posted by The Cusp

Yeah, but the university students weren't getting treats when they got it right!

True, lol!

Very interesting video. It seems their short term memory is lightning quick and incredibly accurate. Xei raises a good point, why are chimps better at this than humans, and why wasn't this attribute carried on in our own evolution? You would think that humans would outperform any animal in any sort of intellectual activity, but obviously that is not the case.

I'm willing to bet that chimps are actually more advanced than us in every way possible! They are just so clever as to fool us into believing that we are smarter...yes.

I would wager that a lot of the reason is that they need it for moving through trees at high speed. This is the best video that I could find:



Essentially, they have to compete with almost entirely arboreal monkeys in the trees to catch them. They need to be able to form a mental map of the structure of the tree they're in on the fly. That could well have something to do with it. It's pretty cool.

I wonder if other animals that hunt in trees could pass a similar test that didn't require number recognition? I can't think of what test that would be though.

You're probably right, cool video.