Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while 18-month-old children follow the experimenter’s example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even before preschool, toddlers are more sophisticated in their social learning skills than their closest primate relatives.
This innate proficiency allows them to grow in both physical and social skills as they begin school and progress through life.
“We compared three species to determine which abilities and skills are distinctly human,” explained Esther Herrmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and lead author of the research paper. Humans differ from their great ape relatives because human brains are about three times the size of the closest primate relatives and humans have language, symbolic math and scientific reasoning.
“Social cognition skills are critical for learning,” Herrmann said. The children were much better than the apes in understanding nonverbal communications, imitating another’s solution to a problem and understanding the intentions of others,” she said.
This is the first comprehensive test comparing social and physical skills of children, chimpanzees and orangutans, Herrmann explained.
About 230 subjects – chimps, orangutans and 2.5 year-old children – were compared using similar tests. In physical tests there were all about equal. In the social skills of communication, learning and determining what others mean when they act, the children were correct in about 74 percent of the tests, while the two ape species were correct only about 33 percent of the time.
The researchers chose to study children at an age when they have about the same physical skill level of chimpanzees. Children at 18 months are old enough to handle these tasks and people have not taught them too much so they provide a good comparison, Herrmann said. The apes ranged in age from 3 to 21.
The researchers plan to test other closely related species to map out the evolution of cognitive ability through systematically testing a variety of primate species and eventually comparing their genomes as they become available. -American Association for the Advancement of Science
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