If the ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’ had you worried of a planet run by apes, you should keep an eye on Ravens more.
We have long known Ravens are not your average bird brain. Their intelligence has been documented a thousand years back. More recently, studies experimenting the Ravens’ problem-solving abilities have shown to have cognition similar to human beings and some apes.
For example, one of the human traits is the adaptability to make plans for events in the future, including thinking of a meal to cook for tomorrow or the time to wake up in the morning. Researchers formerly assumed these actions were unique to hominids: human beings and great apes.
A new research might dispute that old perception: Animal cognition researchers Mathias Osvath and Can Kabadayi of Lund University in Sweden says Ravens are just as good as human beings when it comes to pre-planning actions.
The pair has designed a series of experiments that will test if these birds can actually plan for an unseen future.
During one of the experiment, Osvath says no monkey was able to do it and notes that these birds are really more skillful compared to human kids.
But Taylor indicates that the outcomes are subject to criticism. Possibly, he says, they are outdoing the trial.
Studies in the near future should be able to determine precisely how smart these birds are, but at the most basic stage, these results show that human beings may not be as extraordinary as we thought.
