Are Chimps actually smarter than humans?
Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.
Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.
The tasks involved remembering the location of numbers on a screen, and correctly recalling the sequence.
The findings, published in Current Biology, suggest we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives.
Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chimps beat humans in memory test.
This is quite incredible to watch – but is reacting to patterns and sequences really an indication of intelligence, or is it just an ability that is not that useful to us and so has been lost?
Either way, a surprising result!