• Question: Why are wee the most intelligent animals

    Asked by cheese man to Pete, Jake on 13 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jake Langham

      Jake Langham answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      Hiya, I don’t know enough about this to pretent that I’m an expert (like I do for all the space questions). But maybe Pete will know and if not then this question is very close to James’s actual research area so you could try adding him to the question. 🙂

    • Photo: Pete Gwynne

      Pete Gwynne answered on 14 Nov 2017:

      gosh – this is quite a big question. it’s interesting because even though (most) people are smarter than apes like chimps or orangutans, we’re not really all that different. apes and some other animals can do things we used to think were very clever like using tools (you can see videos of an orangutan paddle a boat) or using sign language.
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      i don’t think we know for certain but there’s a few possibilities for how humans ended up a bit smarter. some people think it’s because we lived in bigger groups than apes, so we had to become clever to work out things like who’s in charge and how to be nice to each other. other people think it might be because once we learned how to hunt and find food, the way you got to be more successful than other people was by being cleverer than them rather than being stronger than them.
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      it’s probably just luck though. probably just one smart person was born and because they were clever, they was more successful than everyone else. so they had more children, and those children were also clever and more successful, and had more kids. and that just keeps happening until the whole world (nearly) is smart.
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      James will probably know more about this though!

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