I hate to be the one to break it to ya' but Chimps Are More Evolved Than Humans
Posted on 04/15/2007 6:26:26 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
ORANG-UTANS have been named as the world’s most intelligent animal in a study that places them above chimpanzees and gorillas, the species traditionally considered closest to humans.
The study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems.
The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower. They also suggest that the ancestry of orang-utans and humans may be more closely entwined than had been thought.
“It appears the orang-utan may possess a privileged status among human kindred,” said James Lee, the Harvard University psychologist behind the research. “It is even possible that an orang-utan-like forager occupied a pivotal link in the chain of descent leading to man.”
Both orang-utans and chimpanzees share about 96% of their DNA with humans, although molecular studies suggest that chimpanzees are more closely related.
The study comes at a time when orang-utans are endangered as never before. Once widespread throughout the forests of Asia, they are now confined to just two islands, Sumatra and Borneo, and are highly endangered as a result of habitat loss and poaching.
Lee’s work involved collating a series of separate studies into the intelligence of different primate species. However, his research first had to overcome a much greater hurdle: would it be possible to compare different species of primates at all?
Spider monkeys, for example, have developed brains to cope with a fast-moving life in the tree tops, while slow lorises are small and leisurely nocturnal hunters.
The conventional belief is that comparing the intelligence of different species is meaningless because separate evolution over millions of years will have given them very different brains.
Lee, a junior psychology researcher at Harvard, found that in primates, at least, different rules seem to apply — the development of one set of mental skills seems to prompt the primate brain to develop other mental abilities as well.
“A primate genus with a high rank in an experiment testing particular mental abilities appears to have high ranks in all of them,” said Lee.
He also found that the single most important factor in deciding a species’ intelligence was simply the size of its brain: “The correlation of brain size with mental ability found in humans appears to extend throughout the primate order.”
This “remarkable finding” suggests, he said, that all primate brains work in much the same way, however they have evolved, allowing comparisons between species.
Lee’s research threw up some other surprises, too. Gorillas, for example, emerged as less intelligent than spider monkeys while baboons, often considered relatively bright, were ranked 14th.
Recent field work by Carel van Schaik, a Dutch primatologist who is now at Duke University, North Carolina, appears to bear out Lee’s findings.
Studying orang-utans in Borneo, he found them capable of tasks well beyond chimpanzees’ abilities — such as using leaves to make rain hats and leakproof roofs over their sleeping nests. He also found that in some food-rich areas the creatures had developed a complex culture in which adults would teach youngsters how to make tools and find food.
He and Lee both suggest that the key factor in such developments is the orang-utans’ life-style, spent mostly in the tops of trees where there is little risk from predators. This has allowed them to establish long and settled lives similar to humans’ and also to develop culture and intelligence.
In his own research papers, Van Schaik has suggested that since the ancestors of modern orang-utans split from the human lineage about 15m years ago, the seeds of human culture must go back at least as far.
Chris Stringer, professor of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, agrees that the sociable lifestyles of primates are the driving force behind the development of intelligence. “Primates and early humans had not got the claws and teeth of predators so they had to rely on brainpower to communicate and protect themselves,” he said. “They are sociable creatures and living in small groups seems to have driven brain development.”
The idea that sociability and intelligence are linked is borne out by research into the relative brain power of diverse animal groups including cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and birds.
Dr Vincent Janik, of the sea mammal research unit at St Andrews University, said that some dolphin species had developed the ability to communicate far beyond that of great apes. “Dolphins have some abilities that great apes don’t have, such as copying new sounds. No primate apart from humans can do that,” he said.
Additional reporting: Max Colchester
Non-human primates in order of intelligence
1 Orange-utan
2 Chimpanzee
3 Spider monkey
4 Langur
5 Macaque [don't say it in public]
6 Mandrill
7 Guenon
8 Mangabey
9 Capuchin
10 Gibbon
11 Baboon
12 Woolly monkey
Pretty good one.
I have it on good authority that the chimps think Orangs are nappy headed!
Yeah...
I have a comment:
WHAT?
I hate to be the one to break it to ya' but Chimps Are More Evolved Than Humans
At 4, Bernas is not the computer wizard his mom is, but he is learning. Just the other day he used his lips and feet to play a game on the touch-screen monitor as his mom, Madu, swung from vines and climbed trees.
Madu, a Sumatran orangutan at Zoo Atlanta, shows off his cognitive
skills in a touch-screen computer game.
The two Sumatran orangutans are part of new Zoo Atlanta research that uses computer games to study the cognitive skills of the primates.
The best part? Visitors to the US zoo get to watch their every computer move.
The orangutans play the games on a touch screen built into a tree-like structure in the habitat to blend in with their environment. Visitors watch from a monitor in front of the orangutan exhibit.
Zoo officials hope opening the interactive research to the public will raise awareness of the world's rapidly diminishing orangutan population, which is on track to disappear completely in the next decade.
"The more we understand about orangutan's cognitive processes, the more we'll understand about what they need to survive in the wild," said Tara Stoinski, manager of conservation partnerships for the zoo.
In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals. Correct answers mean food pellets.
There also is a painting game where they can draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen. Printouts of their masterpieces are on display in the zoo.
The computer games test the animals' memory, reasoning and learning, spitting out sheets of data for researchers at the zoo and Atlanta's Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, a partner in the project.
Volunteers from IBM worked nearly 500 hours developing the games, tweaking until the activities were challenging enough for the orangutans.
The data will help researchers learn about orangutans' socialising patterns, such as whether they mimic others or learn behaviour from scratch through trial and error, said Elliott Albers with the Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience, a consortium of researchers at seven universities in the Atlanta area .
In the end, researchers hope the data can point to new conservation strategies so that the 37,000 orangutans living in the wild on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra do not continue to die off.
Just two other US zoos - the National Zoo in Washington, DC, and Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago - are conducting similar research, but only the National Zoo and Zoo Atlanta allow visitors to watch, Stoinski said.
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yitbos
Where do they fall on the Bell Curve?
Orangutans and human originsHumans have a larger number of features that are uniquely shared with orangutans than with any other living ape. Schwartz (1984) proposed that humans are more closely related to orangutans than to chimpanzees - a model that contradicts the greater genetic similarity of base pair sequences in humans and chimpanzees.
Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz
Department of Anthropology
University of Pittsburgh
The view presented here is that genetic similarity of base pair sequences is not a necessary measure of phylogenetic relationship and that morphology continues to exist as an independently reliable source of information on evolutionary relationships. The orangutan model presents a conundrum for biological systematics over how to chose between morphological and genetic evidence when they are in conflict.Higher Primates May Have Asian RootResearchers working in southern Asia have discovered 40-million-year-old fossil teeth and jaw fragments that, in their view, support the controversial notion that anthropoids originated in Asia. The find in Myanmar represents a new species, Bahinia pondaungensis, in the anthropoid group, which includes monkeys, apes, and humans, reports a team led by anthropologist Jean-Jacques Jaeger of UniversitÈ Montpellier-II in France. The teeth show key similarities to those of Eosimias, a 45-million-year-old fossil creature from China that may also have been an early anthropoid (SN: 11/11/95, p. 309)... Jaeger and his coworkers view their new find as evidence for a much earlier origin of anthropoids in Asia, perhaps 55 million to 60 million years ago. In November 1998, the researchers recovered two fragmentary upper jaws and a broken lower jaw, each retaining a number of teeth, belonging to Bahinia. The same excavation level yielded the lower jaw of a previously identified species known as Amphipithecus. Jaegerís group views Amphipithecus as a more anatomically advanced anthropoid that lived at the same time as Bahinia.
by B. Bower
Science News
October 16, 1999The Scars of Evolution"The most remarkable aspect of Todaro's discovery emerged when he examined Homo Sapiens for the 'baboon marker'. It was not there... Todaro drew one firm conclusion. 'The ancestors of man did not develop in a geographical area where they would have been in contact with the baboon. I would argue that the data we are presenting imply a non-African origin of man millions of years ago.'"
by Elaine Morgan
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They're not going to be too happy about that.
They're not going to be too happy about that.
Ok, if these guys are so smart, why are they stuck in the Borneo jungle?
Can’t they get tech support jobs in India or at least fly to Mexico and sneak over the border?
1 Orange-utan
2 Chimpanzee
3 Spider monkey
4 Langur
5 Macaque [don't say it in public]
6 Mandrill
7 Guenon
8 Mangabey
9 Capuchin
10 Gibbon
11 Baboon
12 Woolly monkey
13 Janet Reno
14 Rosie O'Donnell
15 Michael Moore (Though, there's some doubt as to his order)
16 a bag of rocks
17 parsley
18 Nancy Pelosi
19 Harry "The Traitor" Reid
yitbos
Excellent. I bet he works for next to nothing, too.
Gorillas? Where are gorillas? You can't tell me that gorillas are lower than baboons and wolly monkeys.
Why would a guy name his chimp BJ?
I hate the primates.
Sorry, but this list is of the most intelligent non-human primates! ;-P
right turn Clyde...
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