Out-thought by an orangutan?

AP

A five-year-old chimpanzee named Ayumu performs a memory test with randomly placed consecutive Arabic numerals, which are later masked, accurately duplicating the line-up on a touch screen computer in Kyoto, Japan.

The more we study animals, the less special we seem. Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They show empathy. They share.

“It’s not a question of whether they think – it’s how they think,” says Assistant Professor Brian Hare of Duke University in North Carolina, US. Now scientists wonder whether apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking.

The evidence that animals are more intelligent and more social than we thought seems to grow each year, especially when it comes to primates. It’s an increasingly hot scientific field with the number of ape and monkey cognition studies doubling in recent years.

This month scientists mapping the DNA of the bonobo ape found that, like the chimp, bonobos are only 1.3 percent different from humans.

Dr Josep Call, director of the primate research centre at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, says: “Every year we discover things that we thought they could not do.”

Call says one of his recent more surprising studies showed that apes can set goals and follow through with them.

After being told a word, an orangutan points to that object on an iPad computer tablet at Jungle Island zoo in Miami. Picture: AP Photo/J Pat Carter

AP

Orangutans and bonobos in a zoo were offered eight possible tools – two of which would help them get at some food. At times when they chose the proper tool, researchers moved the apes to a different area before they could get the food, and then kept them waiting as much as 14 hours. In nearly every case, when the apes realised they were being moved, they took their tool with them so they could use it to get food the next day.

Call says this is similar to a person packing luggage a day before a trip: “For humans it’s such a central ability.”

For a few years, scientists have watched chimpanzees in zoos collect and store rocks as weapons for later use. In May, a study found they even add deception to the mix. They created haystacks to conceal their stash of stones from opponents.

Hare points to studies where competing chimpanzees enter an arena where one bit of food is hidden from view for only one chimp. The chimp that can see the hidden food, quickly learns that his foe can’t see it and uses that to his advantage, displaying the ability to perceive another ape’s situation. That’s a trait humans develop as toddlers, but something we thought other animals never got, Hare said.

And then there is the amazing monkey memory.

At the National Zoo in Washington, humans who try to match their recall skills with an orangutan’s are humbled. Zoo associate director Dr Don Moore says: “I’ve got a PhD, for God’s sake, you would think I could out-think an orang and I can’t.”

Memorise

In French research, at least two baboons kept memorising so many pictures – several thousand – that after three years researchers ran out of time before the baboons reached their limit. Dr Joel Fagot at the French National Centre for Scientific Research estimates they could memorise at least 10 000 and probably more.

And a chimp in Japan named Ayumu, who sees strings of numbers flash on a screen for a split-second, regularly beats humans at accurately duplicating the line-up. He’s a YouTube sensation, along with orangutans in a Miami zoo that use iPads.

It’s not just primates that demonstrate surprising abilities. Dolphins, whose brains are 25 percent heavier than humans, recognise themselves in a mirror. So do elephants. A study in June found that black bears could do primitive counting, something even pigeons have done.

The trend in research is to identify some new thinking skill that chimps can do, revealing that certain abilities are “not uniquely human”, says primatologist Professor Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Then the scientists find that same ability in other primates further removed from humans genetically. Then they see it in dogs and elephants. “Capacities that we think in humans are very special and complex are probably not so special and not so complex,” De Waal says.

At Duke University, Professor Elizabeth Brannon shows videos of monkeys that appear to be doing a “fuzzy representation” of multiplication by following the number of dots that go into a box on a computer screen and choosing the right answer to come out of the box. This is after they’ve already done addition and subtraction.

This year in France, researchers showed that six baboons could distinguish between fake and real four-letter words – BRRU versus KITE, for example. And they chose to do these computer-based exercises of their own free will, either for fun or a snack.

It was once thought that the control of emotions and the ability to empathise and socialise separated us from our primate cousins. But chimps console, and fight, each other. They also try to soothe an upset companion, grooming them and putting their arms around him.

“I see plenty of empathy in my chimpanzees,” De Waal says. But studies have shown they also go to war against neighbouring colonies, killing the males and taking the females. “That’s something that is also very human and led people to believe that war-making must go back in our lineage six million years,” De Waal says.

When scientists look at our other closest relative, the bonobo, they see a difference. Bonobos don’t kill. Hare says his experiments show bonobos give food to newcomer bonobos, even when they could choose to keep all the food themselves.

One reason scientists are learning more about animal intellect is computers, including touch screens. In some cases, scientists are setting up banks of computers available to primates 24 hours a day. In the French word recognition experiment, Fagot found he got more and better data when it was the baboons’ choice to work.

Brain scans on monkeys and apes have also helped correct mistaken views about ape brain power. It was once thought the prefrontal cortex, the area in charge of higher reasoning, was disproportionately larger than the rest of the brain only in humans, giving us a cognitive advantage, Hare says. But imaging shows that monkey and ape prefrontal cortexes have that same larger scale.

What’s different is that the human communication system in the prefrontal cortex is more complex, Hare says.

So there are limits to what non-human primates can do. Animals don’t have the ability to communicate with the complexity of human language. In the French study, the baboons can recognise that the letters KITE make a word because through trial and error they learn which letters tend to go together in what order. But the baboons don’t have a clue of what KITE means. It’s that gap that’s key.

“The boundaries are not as sharp as people think, but there are certain things you can’t overcome and language is one of them,” says Columbia University animal cognition researcher Professor Herbert Terrace.

And that leads to another difference, Ross says. Because apes lack language skills, they learn by watching and mimicking. Humans teach with language and explanation, which is faster and better, Ross says.

Some of the shifts in scientific understanding of animals are leading to ethical debates. When Emory University researcher Dr Lori Marino co-wrote a groundbreaking study in 2001 on dolphins recognising themselves in mirrors, proving they have a sense of self similar to humans, she had a revelation.

“The more you learn about them, the more you realise that they do have the capacity and characteristics that we think of as a person,” Marino says. “I think it’s impossible to ignore the ethical implications of these kinds of findings.”

After the two dolphins she studied died when transferred to another aquarium, she decided never to work on captive dolphins again. She became a science adviser to the Nonhuman Rights Project, which seeks legal rights for animals. The idea, Marino says, is to get animals such as dolphins “to be deemed a person, not property”.

The intelligence of primates was one of the factors behind a report last year by the US Institute of Medicine that said the US National Institutes of Health should reduce dramatically the number of chimpanzees it uses in biomedical research.

David DeGrazia, a philosophy and ethics professor at George Washington University, says

the issue is more about animal welfare and giving them the right “not to be killed, not to be tortured, not to be confined unnecessarily” than giving them legal standing. – Sapa-AP