Researchers say a chimpanzee at a Swedish zoo has proven that apes are as capable of forward planning as humans.
Zoo minders have uncovered hundreds of stone caches being used by the chimp to hoard ammunition to hurl at visitors.
The chimp at the centre of this study, an alpha male in his 30s called Santino, lives at Furuvik Zoo to the north of Stockholm.
His war against the visiting public began in the 1990s, when he got into the habit of collecting stones from the moat surrounding his artificial island.
Santino would stack these up in the morning and then wait for visiting time when the bombardment would begin.
However the chimp was not only capable of this unusual example of forward planning. He also managed to break lumps of concrete into manageable sized missiles by checking for their weak points.
Mathias Osvath, a Lund University researcher, says Santino's behaviour shows convincingly that our fellow apes consider the future in a very complex way.
Mr Osvath says that Santino was "without exception" calm when gathering or manufacturing his ammunition, "in contrast to the typically aroused state" during displays.
"It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events," he said.
"They most probably have an inner world like we have when reviewing past episodes of our lives."
- BBC/AFP
When they learn how to use guns, then Planet of the Apes is no longer a French novel. Luckily he didn't kill an American, otherwise George would have added Apeland to the Axis of Evil!
That chimp is awesome. Who is with me?
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