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Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 gestures to communicate with each other
- joe_the_user 16y agoInteresting... I once saw a parrot dance to the beat of music while singing along then call out to the children in the next room to join it. There are a number of very intelligent animal species. Still, I think the barrier to "human-like intelligence" isn't understanding words but using words in grammatical sentence (call me a stick-in-the-mud Chomskyan...).
- 6ren 16y agoDoes the intelligence of human beings fill a niche that in some way prevents other intelligences from evolving? As the dominant species, on top of the foodchain, I can see that we might try to prevent a rival intelligence from competing for resources; but it seems that that would not prevent that rival intelligence from arising in the first place. The brains of birds have developed further since our common ancestor, and it seems reasonable that an intelligence similar to our own could evolve in quite a different brain structure. (I think abstraction is the key need; maybe grammar is somehow based on an internal mechanism for relating abstractions, but it certainly helps in communication - and without that, we would gain much less benefit from our intelligence.)
- asnyder 16y agoIt's a shame that chimpanzees get all this attention, lets shift some of that to bonobos.
- kadavy 16y agoTrue. Bonobos are more closely related to humans. There's some incredibly fascinating information about how humans are related to bonobos in sexual behavior (and overall communal behavior) in the book Sex at Dawn. Highly recommended.
- vacri 16y agoThat's 65 more than I use when driving!