If you’re like us, you watched Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes and thought to yourself afterwards “what a load of rubbish, there’s no way a chimp could outsmart me” or “that remake was shit”.
But now it seems that this has become reality as a team of bored Japanese scientists got to pit man against beast to see who was cleverer. However we would like to point out that the chimps were only facing a group of college students. As we all know most students don’t really give a toss about their work/task unless the deadline is three days away. More than likely they were concentrating too much on what cheap nasty cider they were going to get wasted on later that day.
The task was simple, after a few numbers appeared on a screen the volunteers had to press in where they thought they had appeared. So what was the point in this? Well, scientists were looking to see if chimps – our closest living ancestor – were as smart as us when it comes to memory. Lead researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa said:
"There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions.”
Two sets of chimps were tested against some students who took part to either get a bit of extra income or who wanted to play with a chimp for a day. The mother chimps and their offspring were tested separately to see if age was a factor in speediness and memory. We can only presume no father chimps were present due to football being on the TV.
And what did they find? Basically, we are thick compared to a creature that we throw peanuts at in a zoo and laugh at when it shits all over the floor.
“They found that, in general, the young chimps performed better than their mothers and the adult humans. The university students were slower than all of the three young chimpanzees in their response.”
So they you have it. We are officially dumber than a chimp when it comes to memory. However we still have the upper hand when it comes to driving a car, being able to write and putting together some flat pack furniture from Ikea. Well to be fair, we can’t do that very well, but we’d like to see a chimp try and outsmart us there.
At the end of the experiment, we presume the chimps celebrated their win over us moronic human beings with a cup of PG Tips and a fat Cuban cigar.
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