Researchers tested the cognitive ability of apes – and it could change the way we think of intelligence - BBC Wildlife Magazine

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist and your guide through some of the most remarkable true stories about our closest relatives on this planet. Every episode, I bring you science that feels personal, because honestly, it is personal. We are going to talk about apes and monkeys and the deep biological threads that connect us all. Today we've got stories about how researchers are rethinking what intelligence even means after testing apes, we'll look at some genuinely surprising communication abilities in orangutans that were thought to be uniquely human, and we'll trace the origins of something you probably did this morning — kissing — back millions of years before our species ever existed. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a rich portfolio across the silicon industry. These are the people keeping the lights on so I can keep telling these stories. Alright — let's go meet our family. June: So let's start with cognition, because there's a study that I keep thinking about, and once I tell you about it, I think you'll understand why. Researchers set out to formally test the cognitive abilities of great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans — and what they found is genuinely reshaping how scientists define intelligence itself. Now, for a long time, the dominant framework for measuring animal intelligence was pretty human-centric. We'd design tests, the animals would take them, and we'd rank them by how close they came to performing the way a human would. And by that measure, sure, apes did well — but the framing always put humans at the top of a ladder, with everyone else climbing toward us. What this newer wave of research is pushing back on is the ladder metaphor entirely. June: Here's what's so compelling. When researchers designed tests that were actually tailored to the natural strengths of apes — their spatial memory, their social intelligence, their ability to read intentions — the results were extraordinary. Chimpanzees, for instance, have a short-term visual memory that in certain controlled tasks outperforms adult humans. Not sometimes — consistently. There's a famous experiment out of Kyoto University where young chimpanzees memorized the positions of numbers on a screen and recalled them after the numbers vanished, faster and more accurately than human adults doing the same task. That's not a fluke. That's a cognitive architecture that evolved for a reason. June: And what researchers are now arguing is that intelligence isn't one thing. It's a collection of tools, shaped by the pressures of survival in a particular environment. A chimpanzee navigating a complex social hierarchy, tracking dozens of relationships, remembering who did what to whom three years ago — that's sophisticated cognition. It just doesn't look like what we put on an I Q test. The same goes for problem-solving. Apes in field and lab settings have demonstrated the ability to plan ahead, to use tools in sequences, to teach skills to their young. These aren't reflexes. These are flexible, adaptive, intelligent behaviors. June: What I love most about this shift in thinking is that it asks us to be humble. It asks us to look at another mind on its own terms rather than measuring it against our own as the standard. And when you do that — when you actually do that — you see intelligence everywhere in the primate world. You see it in the bonobo who defuses tension with a touch. You see it in the orangutan mother who carries her infant for years, teaching her everything she knows. You see it in the gorilla who remembers a caretaker's face after a decade apart. Intelligence is not our invention. It's our inheritance — and we share it. June: Now let's talk about our shared biological recipe, because this is the part that never gets old for me, no matter how many times I come back to it. We share somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of our D N A with chimpanzees. You've probably heard that number, but I want to sit with it for a second, because I think we let it wash over us too quickly. 98 to 99 percent. That means if you printed out the entire human genome — all three billion base pairs — and then printed out a chimpanzee's genome right next to it, the overwhelming majority of those pages would be identical. The differences fit in a very thin booklet at the end. June: And it's not just chimpanzees. We share about 98 percent of our D N A with bonobos, around 98 with gorillas, about 96 to 97 percent with orangutans, and even about 93 percent with macaques — old world monkeys. What this tells us is that the basic biological instructions for building a primate brain — the architecture of neurons, the chemistry of emotion, the machinery of memory — were largely written long before our species appeared. We didn't invent the recipe. We inherited it, with small edits. June: And here's where the orangutan communication research comes in, because it fits perfectly. Researchers at the University of Warwick found that orangutans use a level of communication complexity that was previously thought to be uniquely human. Specifically, they observed what's called combinatorial communication — where individual signals are combined to create new meanings, in context-dependent ways. That is a foundational principle of human language. We combine sounds into words, words into sentences, and the meaning changes based on context and combination. And orangutans are doing something structurally similar. Not with words — but with gestures, vocalizations, and facial expressions woven together. June: What this tells us, biologically, is that the cognitive machinery required for complex, layered communication was present in our common ancestor with orangutans — an ancestor that lived somewhere around 13 to 15 million years ago. We didn't evolve language from nothing. We elaborated on something that was already there. That shared ancestor passed down circuits for social signaling, for intentional communication, for reading another mind's state — and both we and the orangutans have been running those circuits ever since, in our own ways. June: This is what I mean by a shared recipe. It's not that we are the same as our primate relatives. We're not. There are real differences, and they matter. But the underlying ingredients — the D N A, the neural architecture, the emotional systems, the drive to communicate and connect — those were written into the recipe millions of years before any of us arrived. We are variations on a theme that life started playing a very, very long time ago. June: And that brings me to my favorite part of every episode — the story that lands it all somewhere real and human and warm. And today, the story I want to tell you is about kissing. Specifically, where it comes from — because scientists have now traced it back millions of years before humans existed, and honestly, the more I think about it, the more it moves me. June: Researchers studying primate behavior and evolutionary history have pieced together evidence that kissing — or something functionally very close to it — appears across great apes, and likely existed in forms going back to our earliest primate ancestors. We see pressing of lips or muzzles together as a social or bonding behavior in chimpanzees, bonobos, and other great apes. The analysis suggests this wasn't independently invented by each species — it was inherited. Passed down. Bonobos in particular use mouth contact extensively in social bonding, reconciliation, greeting. It's woven into how they maintain relationships and ease tension. June: And then there's the fossil and genomic evidence that points toward Neanderthals — our closest extinct relatives, who lived alongside early modern humans and with whom we interbred — also sharing forms of this behavior. We know Neanderthals had rich social lives, cared for their sick and elderly, buried their dead. The idea that they also kissed should not surprise us. They were running much the same biological recipe we run. June: What's fascinating is that kissing isn't universal across human cultures today — some cultures kiss on the mouth romantically, others don't, some greet with cheek-to-cheek contact, some with nose-pressing. That patchwork suggests something interesting: the biological impulse — the draw toward close facial contact as an act of trust and bonding — seems to be ancient and shared. But the specific form it takes gets shaped by culture. It's a beautiful example of biology providing the canvas and culture painting on it. June: And here's the part that really gets me. When a chimpanzee reaches out and presses their lips to another chimp after a conflict — a gesture of reconciliation, of let's come back together — they are doing something that the neurons in their brain are wired to find meaningful. The same basic wiring that makes a kiss feel like connection to you. That's not a metaphor. That's biology. The same evolutionary pressures that made social bonding essential to survival in social primates shaped both of our nervous systems toward these moments of closeness. We didn't teach them to kiss. We both learned it from the same ancient teacher — a shared ancestor who figured out, long ago, that closeness matters. June: I find that genuinely moving. In a world that spends a lot of energy cataloguing our differences — from each other, from other species — there's something quietly radical about the science that keeps pointing back to sameness. Not identical. But related. Deeply, biologically, behaviorally related. When you watch a bonobo hold a friend's face gently after a stressful moment, you're not watching something alien. You're watching something ancient, and familiar, and yours. June: So that's our episode today — three threads, one throughline: intelligence is older and wider than we thought, our biological recipe is a shared document, and the tender gestures that make us feel most human turn out to be things we inherited, along with everything else, from a family much larger than ourselves. June: Thank you so much for spending this time with me and with our primate family. Kindred Minds is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — genuinely grateful for their support. If today's episode made you feel a little more connected to the living world, please subscribe, leave a review, share it with someone you love, and check the link in show notes for sources and further reading. Stay curious, stay kind — and remember, the minds around us, in all their forms, are more kindred than we know.