The ravens were taught to use a tool to open a box that contained a reward. Once they had that down, they were then offered their choice of a tool, which was placed among “distractor” objects, before they were presented with the box 15 minutes later. They successfully chose the tool and opened the box 86 percent of the time, and similar results were found when the box was presented 17 hours later.
Their findings, which were just published in Science show ravens outperformed chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, and even human children, on similar tests.
In other tests, ravens were presented with a token they could use to trade for something better at a later time. In this case, they opted to wait for something better 90 percent of the time.
“To be able to solve tasks like these, one needs a collection of cognitive abilities working in concert, such as inhibitory skills and different forms of memory. That ravens show similar functions, and combine them in ways similar to apes, despite a last common ancestor as far back as 320 million years ago, suggests that evolution likes to re-run good productions,” said Osvath.
Although it should be argued that signs of intelligence on par with our own shouldn’t make any species more or less valuable, the findings here now add to a growing body of research surrounding non-human animal intelligence that will hopefully help grow our appreciation and respect for them.
“One of [our] most interesting results is that intelligence is not restricted to human lineage,” said Kabadayi. “Maybe we should be more humble in looking at ourselves and we should appreciate that there are other ways toward higher cognition.”
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