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Crows are handy with tools, even if they do not have their hands
Here is your daily proof that animals are much smarter than scientists thought: crows imagined building a long stick by gathering smaller sticks to reach a piece of unattainable food.
According to senior author Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University, this tells us something about the thought of crows. "They've never seen this tool, but in one way or another, they can predict its properties," he told the BBC. "So, they can predict what they would do if something that did not exist was done, then they can do it and they can use it."
Kacelnik and his colleagues introduced a box containing a piece of food to eight Caledonian crows. But the food was behind a door, which left only a small space downstairs. The food was too far inside the box so crows could come in with their beaks.
The team also gave crows sticks, which were designed to join: one was hollow, so another rod could be inserted inside. Four of the eight crows understood this, built a long stick and recovered the food. One of them went further and made sticks from four pieces.
The results were published yesterday in Scientific reports.
They are one more stone on a mountain of evidence that the cognitive abilities of humans are not as exceptional as we thought. Or at least they are not exceptional in the way we thought. Obviously, we are the only species to have sent space probes to Pluto and created artistic masterpieces such as Paddington 2. In a way, we are not quite like other animals. But what is the difference?
A few decades ago, the most important idea was that we were the only animal capable of making and using tools. The invention of the first tool, which allows us to manipulate nature in a way that our body could not alone, would have been the first link in a chain of inventions that led to the wheel, the press, print and springs coming down stairs.
Incidentally, for anyone baffled by 2001: The Space Odysseyis the object of the first 16 minutes. The movie's monkeys are short of food and vulnerable to predators, until they learn (with extraterrestrial help) to use bones as tools – and start using them as clubs.
It was a good idea, but it turned out to be totally wrong. A lot of animals can use tools, some of which we would not necessarily have considered intelligent, such as fish. The ability to make tools is rarer, but it is far from unique. Some populations of chimpanzees and monkeys live in a simple version of the Stone Age.
Another often touted idea is that it is our language skills that set us apart. In particular, we use the "combinatorial grammar", which allows us to express a seemingly infinite number of meanings using a limited number of words, combining them according to grammatical rules. A simple example would be the two sentences "dog bites the man" and "man bites dog": they contain the same words, but we immediately understand the different meaning.
Combinatorial grammar is probably difficult to evolve, according to a magazine published in June. But there is evidence that this is not unique to humans. A study published in 2016 showed that birds called big tits respond specifically to certain sequences of calls, for example by looking for a danger, but do not respond when the calls are mixed. It looks a lot like a simple combinatorial grammar. There is also evidence of grammatical "rules" in the songs of Bengal finches, and neurologists have found that humans and birds share crucial brain regions (and genes) that are involved in speech and song.
And so on for other abilities such as counting, learning from others, etc. Again and again, some animals can do these things, although sometimes in a limited way.
What is special about us? There seems to be a combination of two things.
The first is that these skills are more developed in us. Humans can learn to count much higher than other animals and we can (at some level) capture huge and strange numbers like a googolplex, a pi and the square root of minus one.
And the second is that we have all these abilities, not just a selection. Crows are obviously clever with tools, but until now, nothing proves that they use combinatorial grammar – while their counterparts of songbirds do not seem to be keen on tools.
In other words, there is probably not a single ability or trait that we can designate and say "that is what makes us unique". This is more likely to be a rare combination of traits. In other words, human brains all rose to 11.
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Crows are handy with tools, even if they do not have their hands
Here is your daily proof that animals are much smarter than scientists thought: crows imagined building a long stick by gathering smaller sticks to reach a piece of unattainable food.
According to senior author Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University, this tells us something about the thought of crows. "They've never seen this tool, but in one way or another, they can predict its properties," he told the BBC. "So, they can predict what they would do if something that did not exist was done, then they can do it and they can use it."
Kacelnik and his colleagues introduced a box containing a piece of food to eight Caledonian crows. But the food was behind a door, which left only a small space downstairs. The food was too far inside the box so crows could come in with their beaks.
The team also gave crows sticks, which were designed to join: one was hollow, so another rod could be inserted inside. Four of the eight crows understood this, built a long stick and recovered the food. One of them went further and made sticks from four pieces.
The results were published yesterday in Scientific reports.
They are one more stone on a mountain of evidence that the cognitive abilities of humans are not as exceptional as we thought. Or at least they are not exceptional in the way we thought. Obviously, we are the only species to have sent space probes to Pluto and created artistic masterpieces such as Paddington 2. In a way, we are not quite like other animals. But what is the difference?
A few decades ago, the most important idea was that we were the only animal capable of making and using tools. The invention of the first tool, which allows us to manipulate nature in a way that our body could not alone, would have been the first link in a chain of inventions that led to the wheel, the press, print and springs coming down stairs.
Incidentally, for anyone baffled by 2001: The Space Odysseyis the object of the first 16 minutes. The movie's monkeys are short of food and vulnerable to predators, until they learn (with extraterrestrial help) to use bones as tools – and start using them as clubs.
It was a good idea, but it turned out to be totally wrong. A lot of animals can use tools, some of which we would not necessarily have considered intelligent, such as fish. The ability to make tools is rarer, but it is far from unique. Some populations of chimpanzees and monkeys live in a simple version of the Stone Age.
Another often touted idea is that it is our language skills that set us apart. In particular, we use the "combinatorial grammar", which allows us to express a seemingly infinite number of meanings using a limited number of words, combining them according to grammatical rules. A simple example would be the two sentences "dog bites the man" and "man bites dog": they contain the same words, but we immediately understand the different meaning.
Combinatorial grammar is probably difficult to evolve, according to a magazine published in June. But there is evidence that this is not unique to humans. A study published in 2016 showed that birds called big tits respond specifically to certain sequences of calls, for example by looking for a danger, but do not respond when the calls are mixed. It looks a lot like a simple combinatorial grammar. There is also evidence of grammatical "rules" in the songs of Bengal finches, and neurologists have found that humans and birds share crucial brain regions (and genes) that are involved in speech and song.
And so on for other abilities such as counting, learning from others, etc. Again and again, some animals can do these things, although sometimes in a limited way.
What is special about us? There seems to be a combination of two things.
The first is that these skills are more developed in us. Humans can learn to count much higher than other animals and we can (at some level) capture huge and strange numbers like a googolplex, a pi and the square root of minus one.
And the second is that we have all these abilities, not just a selection. Crows are obviously clever with tools, but until now, nothing proves that they use combinatorial grammar – while their counterparts of songbirds do not seem to be expert in tools.
In other words, there is probably not a single ability or trait that we can designate and say "that is what makes us unique". This is more likely to be a rare combination of traits. In other words, human brains all rose to 11.
