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Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past
- mothsonasloth 8y agoSo 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. I'll wait till then before I call out the safe noise. I wonder what happens to orangutans that cry wolf?
- allrightyeo 8y agoWhat I understood is the the warning sound wailed when the risk is far enough not to notice the alarm. about the "cry wolf" topic, a related topic is this one: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141125-four-animals-that-lie-using-sound http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141125-four-animals-that-li...
- nobrains 8y agoCould we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye? If so, could a more advance species have done the same with us and is now observing us from a distance?
- pawelk 8y agoGiven enough advancements in computer science we could simulate millions years of apes evolution within a span of days or hours and observe the results. Which is the basis of the argument for simulation hypothesis [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
- allrightyeo 8y agoisn't that the main loop hole of who was born first? chicken or the egg?
- jobigoud 8y agoEgg was first by millions of years.
- AstralStorm 8y agoDo you mean "cell" which is neither egg (which is a specific specialized kind of a cell - reproductive) nor chicken?
- ginsu 8y agoWell, the cellular specialization arose long before amphibians emerged from bodies of water, and amphibians laid eggs long before birds evolved, eventually branching out into any species of chicken.
- ars 8y agoThat's basically the premise of the Uplift series by David Brin.
- clort 8y agoThe premise of that series is that except for the original species, there had always been intervention to uplift not just observation. Humans had been a bit of a surprise because they had no apparent uplifters. IIRC the general viewpoint was that self-evolution in this way was just not possible so there must have been some kind of deception involved.
- perlgeek 8y ago> Could we let other apes and animals evolve over millions of years under our supervision and eye? I think we must assume we cannot. There hasn't been any major civilization that has been around for more than a few hundred or thousands of years. If we construct such a project in a way that it has a 0.01% chance to crumble in a single year (which is why lower than anything our society can achieve right now), there's about a 10% chance it fails within 10k years, a 63% chance it fails in 100k years, and a 99.995% chance it fails within a million years.
- taneq 8y agoI'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."
- buttscicles 8y agoBut the headline doesn't claim it's a recent development...
- taneq 8y agoI believe the headline may have changed since I posted.
- se7entime 8y ago"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"
- emerongi 8y ago> The name "orangutan" (also written orang-utan, orang utan, orangutang, and ourang-outang) is derived from the Malay and Indonesian words orang meaning "person" and hutan meaning "forest",[10] thus "person of the forest".[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan
- dmos62 8y agoThat's a relievingly admirable way to look at these creatures. I find the English "it" an exceptionally tiring feature. There are so many prejudices and world views embded in our languages. We call ourselves hackers, but where's a hackaday.io or hackathons for human language, the ubiquitous communication medium?
- yorwba 8y agoWhat would one do at such an event? Maybe something like that already exists, just without "hack" in the name.
- dmos62 8y agoI think that we, as a civilization, don't really have the infrastructure (habit?) to talk about language i.e. look at it as technology, much less modify it. There's people creating artificial languages, which is really cool, but there's no obvious way to apply that in a mainstream way. Then again, if someone were to start using English in a different way, it might catch on. He would just have to optimize his changes for acceptable backwards-compatibility. I guess the beauty about people as communicating devices is that they can adopt to changes in protocol, as opposed to some others (looking at you internet devices). Edit: an artificial language is a bad term, there's no such thing, because it would imply that there's a natural language. It's just a new language, sometimes academic.
- teknopaul 8y agohttps://youtu.be/JdpspllWI2o https://youtu.be/JdpspllWI2o UK ban on efforts to save Orangutans in return for an arms deal is perhaps worth a mention here.
- gdfasfklshg4 8y agoThis advert was banned for the same reason as ALL political lobbying adverts are banned from UK TV. Political lobbying is not allow on UK TV.
- fredley 8y agoI think it's a great ad, and that it's an issue that will benefit from wider awareness (although it's got that anyway in spades during this whole thing), but I'm 100% with the decision to disallow this ad from being broadcast on TV. It is a Greenpeace ad, and Greenpeace is a political organisation.
- gdfasfklshg4 8y agoI agree with you 100%. I also think that we should just ban palm oil in general. I'm not sure that it has any applications worth the damage to rainforests.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoAn article came across my feeds today suggesting that banning palm oil might have unintended side effects [1] Basically, a reduction in consumption of palm oil would result in manufacturers switching to soybean oil instead. A lot of soybean oil is grown in South America and contributes to deforestation over there. Banning palm oil simply shifts the environmental damage. Palm oil is also apparently one of the least land intensive oils to grow. Instead of banning specific products, we should work towards sustainable growing instead. I haven't done any additional research on those claims, but it is food for thought. [1] https://theconversation.com/palm-oil-boycott-could-actually-increase-deforestation-sustainable-products-are-the-solution-106733 https://theconversation.com/palm-oil-boycott-could-actually-...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Flavius 8y agoWell, 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.
- jobigoud 8y agoI've always been impressed by this picture of an Orangutan spear fishing: https://primatology.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/orangutan-tool-use-fishing.jpg https://primatology.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/orangutan-to...
- subroutine 8y agoPuts on critic hat The article is making a claim that can be summarized as... the cognitive capacity to share with conspecifics something learned more than 120 seconds ago, is unique to humans and orangutans 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). Conveying info about the past is something bees can do; yet it escapes Chimps and Bonobos. Yeah, ok.
- twimbley 8y agoSo you're idea is that lots of living things innately perform this sort of skill, and that choosing to look at from a certain perspective lends the impression that it's a hallmark of intellectual distinction, simply because they're choosing to look at things the wrong way? I think the idea is that it takes a bit more abstract symbolic thought to look at rival predators, then look at peers of the same species, and make eye contact and include a gesture that expresses a suggestion to stay hidden and keep quiet. If I hop a fence, hide from the cops, and then unexpectedly find you in the same place, also hiding, then for me to hold up my finger over my lips would represent my recognition of you as a fellow peer on the run also threatened with arrest and jail. That's a certain sort of interesting cognitive leap that I would not expect to see in most apes. If orangutans can do it, it's notable. I suspect you might see something like this in squid or octopoda. In bees, signaling dances aren't precisely the same kind of symbolic thought, because they don't have capacity to select what they dance about. It's a somewhat inflexible, robotic gambit of flowers, nectar, hive, honey, and nothing that deviates from the program, as complex as the program may be in its own right.
- mannykannot 8y agoThis is the problem with regarding intelligence as just a collection of externally-observable behaviors. We simply don't know, at this point, the extent to which the orangutans are choosing this pattern of behavior as a result of considering the possible outcomes of the alternatives. As someone who spends a fair amount of time hiking in woodlands, I am familiar with the squeak of a chipmunk dashing for its burrow after spotting me, and I get the impression that they are silent if I have come close to them before they notice me. It is not difficult to posit how this pattern of behavior could arise from the interplay of a couple of related instinctive responses, and the same can be said for this orangutan behavior (though it does require the ability to remember a recent threat.) Whether there is more to it than that cannot be deduced from these observations.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoCan we load them up with magic mushrooms and see if they become capable of abstract thought? [1]. 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. [1] https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis
- aritmo 8y agoThe 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." Whales should be able to do so. They have family links that transcend more that fifty years.
- peacetreefrog 8y agoAgree, it's minor but I find the headline annoying.
- coldcode 8y agoSoon only humans will talk about orangutans in the past.
- WhiteMonkey 8y ago:(
- jmngomes 8y agoFor anyone wondering why/if orangutans are a threatened species: - Dramatic decline in Borneo's orangutan population: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/15/dramatic-decline-in-borneos-orangutan-population-as-150000-lost-in-16-years https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/15/dramatic... - Palm oil producers are wiping out orangutans: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/10/palm-oil-orangutans-multinationals-promises-deforestation https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/10/palm-o...
- gnulinux 8y agoI 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.
- pvaldes 8y agoI don't buy it. Gorillas can talk about past experiences also at least