Apes that remember to carry the right tools to retrieve treats and scrub jays that hide food a second time when they think a rival is watching prove animals can think ahead–a trait once believed to be uniquely human, scientists have found. Two carefully planned sets of experiments to be published on Friday in the journal Science show intelligent birds and great apes can plan into the future in a way that transcends simple food caching, as squirrels, foxes and other animals do. ‘Planning for future needs is not uniquely human,’ Thomas Suddendorf of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, wrote in a commentary. ‘Apes and jays can also anticipate future needs by remembering past events, contradicting the notion that such cognitive behavior only emerged in hominids.’ In one experiment, Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, tested bonobos, close relatives of chimpanzees, and orangutans at the local zoo. The tool option They set up several experiments that required the apes to remember a complex way to retrieve a treat and offered them the opportunity to use tools to do so. So far, observations […]