Is a chimp smarter than a 4-year-old?

Chimps spit water into tube to reach peanuts


In Aesop’s fable “the crow and the pitcher” the bird uses stones to raise the water level in a jug. Chimps in an experiment showed a similar problem solving skills to obtain some peanuts.

A research team in Germany tested this challenge on five gorillas, 43 chimpanzees and three groups of 24 kids aged 4, 6 and 8.

The subjects were given a 26 centimter glass tube quarter filled with water and several peanuts and a water dispenser a meter away. The test was designed so that they could only reach their prize was by filling up the vial several times with water so that the peanuts reached the top, lead researcher Daniel Hanus, from the Max Planck Institute told BBC.

In the experiment, all five gorillas were overwhelmed by the task. For the humans, two of the 4-year-olds, 10 of the 6-year-olds and 14 of the 8-year-olds succeeded in solving the puzzle.

Out of 43 chimps, 14 realized that they needed to spit water into the glass tube, and half of that actually obtained the peanuts.

Scientists said that the three groups found it more difficult to obtain the peanuts when they were contained in a dry tube because “it requires thinking about water as a possible solution without having already seen it or its effect.”



By Christopher Kim

Intern Reporter

(chriskim1006@gmail.com)