The Monkey Wire (no, really) is jumping with news of a study that shows chimpanzee babies are smarter than humans:
Daily Express
Professor Kim Bard, of the Centre for the Study of Emotion at the University of Portsmouth, studied the care records of 46 baby chimps at risk of death through neglect by their mothers.A group of 17 given “responsive care” had human carers looking after them 20 hours a week. They tended to their physical and emotional needs, grooming, feeding and interacting with them. Professor Bard then looked at a second group of 29 given standard care catering only for physical needs.
She compared the results with standard measurements of the intellectual development of human babies aged nine months. Chimps given responsive care scored 110, the average human baby at nine months 100 and chimps given only basic care 91.
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She also found that babies in Romanian orphanages performed even worse than chimps given only basic care.
TheMedGuru.com
Prof Bard revealed that chimps receiving an average of 20 hours of attention a week were happier than those who just had their physical needs fulfilled.She said, “Early experiences, either of warm, responsive care-giving or of extreme deprivation, have a dramatic impact on emotional and cognitive outcomes in both chimpanzees and humans”.
The study acted as a “stark warning” to raise the fact that looking after just the physical needs of an infant were most likely to make him/her unhappy, maladjusted and under-achieving.
Discovery News
Follow-up studies on the chimpanzees are planned, but comparisons between humans and chimpanzees at later ages are complicated by the fact that the two primates interact with themselves and the world in different ways. Humans also define intelligence with our particular abilities as the yardstick.“There are many domains of development, such as emotional, social, cognitive, communicative and motoric,” Bard said. “Because of the differences in rearing or even cultural experiences, in interaction with development among these domains, it is difficult to pinpoint ages when ‘the typical human’ surpasses ‘the typical chimpanzee.'”