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PIN is no ordinary monkey. If you stick out your tongue at her, she'll return the compliment. If you show her how to open a latched box, she'll rotate the box until she finds the latch, then open it herself. Place a piece of fruit just out of reach and she'll pick up a rake and drag the fruit towards her. All of which is remarkable, because monkeys are not natural imitators and nor, as a rule, do they use tools.
Pin is a Japanese macaque trained by Atsushi Iriki, head of the Laboratory for Symbolic Cognitive Development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan. According to Iriki, Pin's remarkable abilities offer an unprecedented window on one of the most important events in evolution: the emergence of human intelligence.
It's well known that non-human primates can be taught to do very human-like things: chimps and orang-utans have wowed the world with their ability to learn sign language, for example. But the general assumption is that there is an immutable upper limit to their abilities. Iriki thinks otherwise. "It is often said that a monkey has the ability of a 2-year-old kid, and an ape that of a 7-year-old, but it's not like that," he says. "Through training, you can extend the spectrum of the monkey's ability closer to a human-like intelligence."
Iriki is not attempting to raise a race of supersmart monkeys. He is much more interested in finding out what macaques can tell us about ourselves.
His controversial hypothesis is that the macaque brain contains all the components that gave rise to human intelligence - it's just that they have never been assembled. In the macaque's natural environment, there was no demand for it. But put the macaques in a new environment, place new demands on them, and you can unlock that potential. This, Iriki says, is the nearest thing we have to experimentally rerunning the tape of human evolution to reveal how our primate ancestors went from leaping about in trees to writing symphonies and sending spacecraft to the moon (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol 363, p 2229).
Iriki's starting point, like that of many others before him, is that the explosion of human intellectual abilities was triggered by tool use. When primates stood up on their hind legs, they freed up their hands to use tools. This somehow unleashed a cascade of brain changes that led, slowly but inexorably, to the evolution of higher cognitive powers such as self-awareness, language and intelligence.
The tool hypothesis has been around for many years, but exactly how tools kick-started a revolution remains unclear. It is also at odds with the fossil record. The earliest known stone tools are about 2 million years old, yet nothing resembling fully intelligent behaviour emerged until 200,000 years ago. "The idea that you start using tools and, bang, all the rest follows - that's not what the fossil record seems to suggest," says social neuroscientist Christian Keysers at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands.
Iriki's unique perspective on the problem is that tool use was the catalyst for a much more important mental breakthrough, albeit one that took 1.8 million years to unfold: the emergence of a sense of self. By this he means the ability to conceptualise one's own existence in time, plan for the future and understand "intentionality" - your capacity to change your environment.
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Macaque's are very intelligent. At Marwell zoo they are 'semi loose' - they are released from their sleeping boxes and could, if so wished, roam the zoo, but know which side their bread is buttered - and where they are fed - so stay near to their enclosure. However, when my daughter put her wine down on the wooden rail of the fence of their enclosure - one tried to swipe it!!
I have a wonderful photo of said daughter looking like she's attempting to decimate a (not so innocent) monkey - but in reality she's holding her hands up in horror at what would happen to it if it had drunk the wine! LOL
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Fascinating! Bet you could get money for that pic Maggie!
Lizx
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