So You Think You are Smarter than a 5 Year Old Chimpanzees

“It’s amazing what this chimpanzee is able to do“

Once again chimps astonish researchers as they rival their human counterparts. The results showed that the chimps, “while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster”.

Think you’re smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.

That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that “humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

“No one can imagine that chimpanzees – young chimpanzees at the age of 5 – have a better performance in a memory task than humans,” he said in a statement.