Orangutan vs chimpanzee which is smarter

The human language puzzle has lots of pieces, but being able to use our vocal chords to make different sounds is an important one.

Orangutans in captivity make lots of different sounds, although nobody knows where they pick them up. They do amazingly different things," Lameira says. One idea, developed by linguist Professor Shigeru Miyagawa at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, is that human speech emerged from two different offshoots of animal communication.

One is the simple word-like calls primates make. The other is the sentence-like melodies we find among songbirds. And these seem to have different meanings," Clarke explains. Great apes are really good at this game of 'do as I do. Psychologist Dr Katie Slocombe of the University of York has shown that chimpanzees have some flexibility in their voices, too, making different noises to refer to certain foods.

Funding was provided by the medical center's Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy. Experts in psychology broadly define intelligence as general problem-solving skills -- "domain-general cognition" in the parlance of the field. This intelligence allows an animal to tackle new and unpredictable situations. Domain-general cognitive ability is separate from domain-specific abilities for solving certain environmental challenges, such as a bird remembering where it cached food.

Intelligence testing of animals has repeatedly revealed that some species perform better than others. This suggests that some animals have better domain-general skills, Deaner said. However, scientists have been hard-pressed to convincingly prove these differences could be attributed to intelligence, he added. For example, one species may be more comfortable grabbing a joystick.

Deaner and his colleagues reasoned that they could refute this premise -- that performance differences resulted from particular testing situations -- by demonstrating that some primate species surpassed others across a wide range of problem-solving tests.

Primates are an excellent comparison group because their similar perceptual and motor skills means that the same tests are generally appropriate for all of them, Deaner said. But developing a suitable data set to test this idea was not easy. Then we realized the data had already been gathered by an army of comparative psychologists. The team first pored through hundreds of published studies, then assigned each testing situation or experiment to one of nine overall paradigms.

For example, one paradigm was patterned strings. This undated handout picture shows two chimpanzees. A unique study published in the journal Science that compared the abilities of human toddlers to chimpanzees and orangutans found that 2-year-old children exhibited social learning skills superior to the apes. European scientists gave a battery of cognitive tests lasting three to five hours separately to 2-year-old children, chimpanzees and 32 orangutans over two weeks.

The researchers believe their findings provide insight into the evolution of human cognition. A unique study comparing the abilities of human toddlers to chimpanzees and orangutans found that 2-year-old children have social learning skills superior to the apes, researchers said on Thursday.