Animals Compared to Humans: What skills are distinctly human?
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany compared the abilities and skills of chimps, orangutans and two year old humans. They found that human children were better at social learning.
Social learning
Researchers love to compare humans to our close relatives the great apes. This video shows footage of a study that compared the physical and social skills of orang-utans, chimps and 2-year-old children.
Humans and apes had similar concepts of the physical world, but the researchers found that humans were better at social learning. The toddlers could recognise non-verbal cues better than the apes and were also more likely to learn by example.
However, the tests did ask the apes to learn from humans. Perhaps they would be better at learning from their own species?
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