SKIRMISHER

They are better than us at climbing trees, they have a more impressive bite and they would make a formidable opponent in a fight. But the brain is one area where humans have come to regard themselves as superior to the great apes.

No longer. Japanese researchers have found three young chimps that can beat people at a numerical memory task. The performance of the best chimp did not drop off even when it was given a fraction of a second to remember where the numbers were – suggesting it has an ability akin to photographic memory.

“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said Tetsuro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University, who led the study. “No one can imagine that chimpanzees – young chimpanzees at the age of five – have a better performance in a memory task than humans.

“Here we show for the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working memory capability for numerical recollection – better than that of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same procedure.”

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