<i>Puts on critic hat</i><p>The article is making a claim that can be summarized as...<p><i>the cognitive capacity to share with conspecifics something learned more than 120 seconds ago, is unique to humans and orangutans</i><p>They also inform you that bees have this capacity. That should be enough to make anyone skeptical. It seems like they identified a particular behavior unique among apes to Orangutans - suppressing vocalization in response to threat - ran an experiment to confirm their bias, and are spinning it as a story about the ability to talk about the past (rather than simply that Orangutans have evolved to deal with perceived threat by keeping quiet while the threat is present, and then going bananas after it's gone).<p>Conveying info about <i>the past</i> is something bees can do; yet it escapes Chimps and Bonobos. Yeah, ok.
"orangutan" if i translate to my Native Languange (i'm Indonesian), orang = human in general (could be man/woman), utan = forest, so i can say "orangutan" mean "The Human that Live in Forest"
Can we load them up with magic mushrooms and see if they become capable of abstract thought? [1].<p>For those that don't want to click on my link, there's a (not very scientific) hypothesis that human consciousness evolved from our ancestors eating magic mushrooms.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis</a>
I'm pretty sure orangutans have been able to do this for a while. Headline should be "We just realised that Orangutans can also talk about the past."
I've always been impressed by this picture of an Orangutan spear fishing: <a href="https://primatology.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/orangutan-tool-use-fishing.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://primatology.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/orangutan-to...</a>
<a href="https://youtu.be/JdpspllWI2o" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/JdpspllWI2o</a><p>UK ban on efforts to save Orangutans in return for an arms deal is perhaps worth a mention here.
So in layman's terms the orangutan's thought process is like so; I just saw a Tiger. The last time I saw one it was hanging around the area for X minutes.<p>I'll wait till then before I call out the safe noise.<p>I wonder what happens to orangutans that cry wolf?
The article should have said "we just found that some orangutans can also talk about the past. We are excited to look for other animals that can do the same."<p>Whales should be able to do so. They have family links that transcend more that fifty years.
Well, it's a good thing that we're whipping them out by destroying their natural habitat. We don't need any competition. We need that sweet palm oil so we can burn it as biodiesel and destroy the whole planet.
I don't know what about orangutans impresses me, but when I watch a video of an orangutan, it never feels like I'm watching a video of "an animal". There is something very "human" about orangutans, even more than chimps, bonobos or gorillas.
Could we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye?<p>If so, could a more advance species have done the same with us and is now observing us from a distance?