Can it be true?
Remember that this isn’t really a general memory test. It’s one very specific test. And the chimps didn’t really out-remember the humans; they were just able to perceive symbols flashed up on a screen more quickly. That doesn’t make the results any less surprising. It’s hard to test the intelligence of somebody who doesn’t speak; we consider speaking to be so simple that we just take it for granted. But chimpanzees are very close relatives to us, and so one might suspect that they would have a fair bit of cognitive capacity in their skulls that we can’t understand because we can’t communicate with them the way we communicate with each other. Still, I don’t think anybody really expected they’d come so close to us, even in such a limited test. It does suggest that a lot of human mental evolution occurred even before we became human, and that helps us narrow down precisely what it is that makes us human. I’m intrigued by the researcher’s hypothesis that it’s something children may do bett
