【挑战TIME】第一期

Babies Vs. Chimps: Who‘s Smarter?

　　Humans have a lot in common with the great apes. We both make tools; we both have something sort of like laughter; and we share about 94% of our DNA.

　　Well now researchers from the Max Planck Institute are trying to puzzle just what cognitive skills we share with these forest creatures. Their study published today in the journal Science compares these skills of two-and-a-half-year-old children to those of chimps and orangutans ranging from 3 to 21 years old. They found that the children and apes equally good at numerical and spacial skills, but when it comes to social learning the children left the apes in the dust.

　　For instances, toddlers learn how to pop open a container by watching the experimenter, and then copying her them. Apes, however, did not imitate. I mean they made connections like stick helps open box. But instead of imitating, the apes used the slower trick of trial and error. The researchers explain that imitation is a very fast way to acquire a lot of knowledge, and may have paved the way for our departure from these primate cousins, and ultimately allowed us to develop the complex social culture we have today.