[ad_1]
Getty ImagesZooBorns / Barcoft Images / Barcroft Media
Toolmaking is crucial for human survival, and our mammalian cousins have actually picked up on its necessity. The orangutans surveyed were nearly flawless, assembling the fishhooks correctly on their first attempts and besting a group of human children.
Advertisement – Continue Reading Below
A team of cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists from Scotland's University of St. Andrews and Austria's University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna tested the primate's abilities to create hook-bending tools.
For the study, published last week in Scientific Reports, researchers presented the apes with a challenge, requiring them to be a part of the world.. A second challenge involved the opposite: a horizontal tube containing a reward at the center that was only retrievable via an unbent tool, which the animals again had to fashion themselves.
As the study's author Isabelle Laumer explained in a press statement, the apes excelled.
"The orangutans generally bent the hooks directly with their teeth and mouth while keeping the rest of the tool straight." Then they immediately inserted it in proper orientation, hooked the handle and pulled the basket up, "she said.
Also competing in the task was the most important thing. All of the children showed an excellent ability to imitate the process: They were able to follow along when given a demonstration of how to turn the basket into a hook. But when given a straight piece of wire, "only around 50 percent of the eight-year-old children are able to solve the problem," the study says.
Even though the children had all the knowledge to solve their problem, their lack of cognitive abilities left them dangling on how to create the fishhook. Laumer cited the fact that "complex problem has been associated with certain areas of the medial prefrontal cortex, which mature later in the child development."
Advertisement – Continue Reading Below
Meanwhile, the orangutans tested were able to complete the fishhook easily. Orangutans are "habitual" the study of the wild, the study notes, but they were able to complete the test. The orangutans were given a 15-minute time limit on the trial. Only one of the adult females was able to solve it within two minutes.
"The orangutans generally bent the hooks directly with their teeth and mouth while keeping the rest of the tool straight." Then they immediately inserted it in proper orientation, hooked the handle and pulled the basket up, "Laumer said.
Josep Call of the University of St. Andrews echoed Laumer's astonishment.
"Finding this capacity in one of our closest relative is astonishing." In human evolution, fishhooks and harpoon-like, hook tools appear relatively late, 16,000 to 60,000 years ago, "he said. "This branch-hauling tool might be one of the earliest and simplest raking tools used and made by great apes and our ancestors."
Some of the Bornean orangutans are being reviewed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List, which means that they are one of the extinct in the wild. Losing such a close ancestor would be a major loss for global biodiversity, an increasing concern for the planet.
Source: University of Vienna
Source link
