ARE GREAT APES FORTUNE TELLERS?
- Ibone Thate Arrazola
- 10 dic 2016
- 2 Min. de lectura
Since ever, humans have been fascinated by great apes and how intelligent their look seems. Many have tried to find their similarity with us, but even more people have attended to show how diffrerent we are. The list of features separating us from apes is never-ending: use of tools, having memory, self-awareness, empathy, thought...
However, these convictions have fallen; great apes are able to understand what someone is thinking even when the idea gets beyond their knowledge.
Scientists have named this ability to anticipate somebody´s thoughts as "mind´s theory".
And it has been proven with bonobos, chimpanzees and orangutans. The experiment was the following: apes and an actor stood in front of two boxes. An object was put into one of the boxes. Ater this, the actor left the scene, the object was taken from the box and the actor entered again. Using a sofisticated system of visual tracing, scientists could see that the apes starred at the empty box when the actor reappeared, knowing that he would act according to a false belief and search for the object into the empty box. They were able to predict his action.
It was a total surprise because this predictive ability had not been observed ever before. Frans de Waal, a prestigious primatologist, afirms that ¨considering the mind theory as something exclusive to humans is going to be wrong in a not very distant future¨.
Furthermore, the discovery is very important from an evolutionary point of view. It´s an example of the ability mosaic we share with great apes and which derivers from our common ancestor. If we want to determine what makes us diffrerent to apes, we must describe the elements that compose this mosaic and study how they are combined.
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