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What are the smartest nonhuman animals? You might immediately think of chimpanzees. Why not? Chimps are widely thought to be closest to humans on the evolutionary ladder. However, as we have noted before, the similarity between chimps and humans has been greatly exaggerated, and it is becoming clearer that there are more genetic differences between us and chimps.
It may seem surprising, but repeated studies have shown that the smartest nonhuman animals are New Caledonian crows and ravens, meaning they are closest to humans in intellectual ability. Nobody places crows and ravens on an evolutionary line with human beings, yet they have demonstrated their ability to outperform monkeys by retrieving food from a tube accessible from only one end. They can also devise a plan to use one tool to obtain another, which they can then use to retrieve food. That is something monkeys and apes have difficulty doing. There is a YouTube video showing a crow going through eight individual steps to obtain the food it wants.
The ability of New Caledonian crows and ravens to manufacture and use tools and to solve problems with tools greatly exceeds that of chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. What do these birds have that the apes do not? The birds have larger forebrains, cerebrums, perineuronal glial clusters, and hippocampi relative to their body size, as humans do. Unlike humans and the great apes, crows and ravens lack a cerebral cortex.
In trying to establish an evolutionary line leading to human beings, we must consider why these birds have brain features humans have, even though the creatures supposedly closest to humans on the evolutionary ladder do not. Perhaps the story is not a common ancestry but a common Designer. When we try to determine the smartest nonhuman animals, maybe we need to consider whether humans are smart enough to realize that evolution does not tell the whole story.
Picture credits:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Corvus_moneduloides_212163787_(cropped).jpg