The new work by Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, described this week in the journal Current Biology, provides the first suggestive evidence of a wild non-human species playing with rudimentary dolls, as well as the first known sex difference in a wild animal’s choice of playthings.

The two researchers say their work adds to a growing body of evidence that human children are probably born with their own ideas of how they want to behave, rather than simply mirroring other girls who play with dolls and boys who play with trucks. Doll play among humans could have its origins in object-carrying by earlier apes, they say, suggesting that toy selection is probably not due entirely to socialization.

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For centuries, philosophers claimed that the ability to make tools separated man from best. But in 1960, a young wildlife researcher named Jane Goodall told her boss, anthropologist Louis Leakey, that she'd witnessed chimpanzees stripping leaves from twigs and using them to “fish” for termites. A stunned Leakey responded, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.” Of course, we now know that chimps were only the beginning …

ELEPHANTS DRINK BOTTLED WATER

Not only do elephants use branches to swat flies and scratch their backs, but they also use tools to plan for the future. In South Africa, biologist Hezy Shoshani observed a pachyderm chewing bark into a large ball and then using the ball to plug up a nearby watering hole. The result was an elephant-size water bottle! Later, the animal came back to the spot, removed the ball, and quenched her thirst again. (Photo: Haaretz)

DOLPHINS COVER THEIR MOUTHS

In addition to bouncing balls on their noses, dolphins are also handy with sponges. Georgetown University researcher Janet Mann reported that bottle-nose dolphins in Australia's Shark Bay have been seen carrying sea sponges in their mouths while fishing along the ocean floor. When they dig into the sand to stir up the hidden fish, the sponges apparently act as a kind of mask. But, of the thousands of bottlenose dolphins identified in Shark Bay, only 41 have been observed doing this. Almost all of them were female, and the behavior seems to be something mothers teach their daughters. (Photo: National Academy of Sciences)

CHIMPS BUILD NUTCRACKERS

Chimpanzees of the Ivory Coast's Tai Forest are the Bob Villas of their species. In order to crack open the hard oil-palm nuts they adore, the chimps use two tools at once. First, they place a nit on a flat stone for traction, then they smash it with a pointed hammer-like stone. The skill takes young chimps several years to master, but once they get the hang of it, they'll store their favorite tool sets in a certain place and bring their nuts there for cracking. A recent archaeological dig found that Tai Forest Chimps have been making nutcrackers like these for 4,000 years.

OWLS MAKE THE MOST OUT OF COW POOP

Some burrowing owls have a strange habit of scattering cow manure around the entrance to their homes in the ground. Until recently, scientists thought this behavior evolved as a way to mask the owl's scent from potential predators. But researchers recently determined that the cow manure actually functions as bait to lure dung beetles, one of the owl's favorite foods.

CROW'S HAVE A LOT TO CROW ABOUT

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New Caledonian crows are widely renowned as the tool-using champs of the bird kingdom. To hunt for insects, they shale sticks into hooks and spears that allow them to probe tree crevices. They also modify those sticks into the correct size and shape by whittling them with a complex process of snips and tears. What's more, New Caledonian crows can make new tools out of old ones and pass along their new inventions to others.

The only other creatures on Earth to do this are humans.

VULTURES CAST STONES

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Egyptian vultures love the taste of ostrich eggs, but they can't break the thick shells by just pecking at them. So hungry vultures go in search of rocks for the job, sometimes venturing up to 50 yards away. When they return, they dip their heads violently and hurl their rock at the egg, smashing open the shell. Surprisingly, this technique appears to be an innate behavior. When presented with tasty eggs, even vultures raised alone in captivity will go hunting for stones.

HERONS GO FISHING

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Like Jane Goodall's chimpanzees, wild green-backed herons "fish" for their food. Using insects, feather, or even flowers, they drop their clever bait into the water and then gobble up the curious fish that some to the surface for a meal. Herons can be remarkably persistent fisherman, too. Reportedly, one researcher in Africa watched a heron drop the same bait into the water 28 times in a row before a fish finally bit.

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The article above, written by David Goldenberg, appeared in the Nov - Dec 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!

When they touched the first digit, the others were replaced with white squares, and they had to rely on their memory to press the right sequence. The young chimps took to this task particularly well and amazingly, they finished the task more quickly than human adults…

When the numbers were flashed for two thirds of a second, Ayumu’s skills were the equal of 6 university students who pressed the right sequence 80% of the time. If the numbers were displayed for just a fifth of a second, the students couldn’t cope. They didn’t have enough time to make a single saccade, the small eye flickers that we make when we scan a page or image. Without the luxury of exploring the screen, the students only answered accurately 40% of the time. Ayumu, on the other hand, wasn’t fazed and maintained his earlier high scores.

The researchers also postulate that human children may have similar eidetic abilities when they are very young, but lose this capacity by the time they finish school.  Or something like that – I can’t remember.

Link.

‘She bought successfully and her portfolio grew almost three times. She did better than almost the whole of the rest of the market,’ said editor of Russian Finance magazine Oleg Anisimov.

He questioned why so-called financial whizz-kids are still receiving hefty perks for their expertise .

‘Everyone is shocked. What are they getting their bonuses for? Maybe it’s worth sending them all to the circus.’

Link -via Blame it on the Voices

If I lived in Japan, I would probably watch more TV. In this episode of Shimura Zoo, Pan-kun must pick up and deliver a cake. It’s not that simple, as everyone wants the cake! Link (embedded YouTube clip) -via Random Good Stuff

“Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans,” said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells[...]

“We found that a significant number of the newly identified targets are expressed differently in human and chimpanzee brains,” Geschwind said. “This suggests that FOXP2 drives these genes to behave differently in the two species.”

The research demonstrates that mutations believed to be important to FOXP2′s evolution in humans change how the gene functions, resulting in different gene targets being switched on or off in human and chimp brains.

Link via io9 | Image: US Department of Energy

Although Dr Campbell doesn’t think the chimps were “fooled” by the animations into thinking they were looking at real chimps, he explained that there was evidence that chimpanzees “process animated faces the same way they process photographs of faces”.

He said: “It’s not a real chimpanzee, but it kind of looks like a chimpanzee, and they’re responding to that.”….

In his future work, Dr Campbell would like to pin down exactly how these measurable behaviours are related to the more difficult to measure phenomenon of empathy.

“We’d like to know more about behaviours related to empathy, like consolation – when an individual does something nice to the victim of aggression,” he told BBC News.

“So we want to see if our good contagious yawners are also good consolers.”

Link via Discover Magazine

Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

According to a new study published in the latest issue of Developmental Psychobiology, orphaned baby chimpanzees that received motherly care and attention from human surrogate parents were found to be more intellectually advanced than the average human baby, when both were compared at nine months. 

When the chimps were nine months old, they took an IQ test normally used to evaluate human infant development. Bard explained that typical items on the cognitive test required the chimps to “imitate scribbling on paper,” look at pictures in a book as the examiner pointed to each one, and pick up a cup to find a block hidden underneath.

The infant chimps aced the test, even surpassing the scores of average human infants tested at the same age.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

Humans are not the only political animals. Mark Foster, an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, discovered that while big, aggressive males rely on physical force to dominate, smaller and more mild-mannered chimps use politics to gain higher social standings:

The finding was gleaned from 10 years of observing dominant male chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, looking at behaviors they used to compete for alpha male status relative to their size.

Analysis showed that larger males relied more on physical attacks to dominate while smaller, gentler males groomed other chimpanzees, both male and female, to gain broad support.

Link – via reddit

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by noface.