That’s pretty much it. I searched, but I didn’t find anything that addressed my exact question.
It’s frequently said that chimps have the intelligence of a 3 year old human. But some 3 year olds are smarter than others, just like some animals are smarter than others of the same species. So why haven’t we come across a chimp with the intelligence of a 10 year old? Like…still pretty dumb, but able to fully use and comprehend written language. Is it likely that this “Hawking chimp” has already existed, but since we don’t put forth much effort educating (most) apes we just haven’t noticed? Or is there something else going on, maybe some genetic barrier preventing them from ever truly achieving sapience? I’m not expecting an ape to write an essay on Tolstoy, but it seems like as smart as we know these animals to be we should’ve found one that could read and comprehend, for instance, The Hungry Caterpillar as written in plain english.
In: Biology
I think it was in Carl Sagan’s book “The Dragons of Eden” where I first learned about Imo, a potential genius in the primate world. It’s been a long time, so I may get some details wrong. Apologies.
Imo was a Macaca fuscata (Japanese monkey also known as the snow monkey) who lived on the island of Kōjima in an archipelago. She lived near the coast/beach. They were studied by Japanese primatologists in the 1950s who would leave them food. The other members of her tribe, would ignore food that had been dropped/covered in sand, and search for clean fruit.
Imo was the first to realise that sweet potatoes could be held under the water, (running fresh water was best but the sea would give a salty flavour) and the sand washed off.
Human researchers, watching the tribe, saw that she tried to pass this trick on to the male leaders of the tribe, who weren’t interested. She was able to pass it on to her offspring though, so they were able to claim a lot of previously unavailable food.
Proving the first discovery wasn’t a fluke, Imo also learned how to sift wheat grains out of the sand by throwing handfuls of sand and wheat into the water, then catching the wheat that floated to the top. You could argue this was her EUREKA moment.
Like the washing, this technique also spread. But there were too many monkeys on the island with too little wheat coming from the humans. Competition became too fierce and the stronger monkeys would steal the collected wheat from the weaker ones, so they stopped the learned behaviour in self-preservation. The stronger ones (the jocks?) were happy to steal from the nerds, but not to do the sifting themselves.
Imo (or her sibling) started another innovation after the submerging of food and wheat in water – the monkeys started submerging more of their bodies in the water, and play-splashing in the ocean. They lost their fear of the water. They can swim up to half a kilometer, but they usually do not like to.
Lyall Watson came up with a theory (in the 1970s) called the 100th monkey effect to explain the sort of psychic Jungian group-mind as the means by which this skill propagated even to monkeys on other islands, because it never occurred to him that Imo might have used her newly found love of water to swim to a nearby island and spread the technique there. His new-agey type theory has since been debunked and discredited.
Imo was a genius of her kind. She used to run down to the shore when the primatologists came with their food. Which might explain why she didn’t flee from poachers, who came to the island, captured and presumably killed her. Poachers often grab the snow monkeys – which can end up as food in China, where they are said to be an aphrodisiac, and for laboratory studies in countries like Holland.
Imo, which first washed the sand from sweet potatoes, and realised wheat floated while sand sunk, was killed by a member of the primate species homo sapiens.
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