[progressiveweb]

Your argument that because bees display a similar behavior, that it's grounds to invalidate the credibility the people conducting this study of Orangutan's cognitive abilities is based on conjecture. You are conflating a reference to another intelligent species as evidence to support a counter view to a commonly agreed upon advanced cognitive capabilities of the Orangutan.

A previous study shows Orangutans do indeed have excellent memories and are able to communicate with humans using commonly agreed upon visual symbols. Long past the 120 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwslHICR7K4

side-note: I feel that often, parent's comment gets a lot of likes, not for the validity of the argument but rather being contrarian for the sake of it. It's troubling because often it appears that they are providing commentary on an area totally unfamiliar and outside the usual field of expertise like engineering. Instead what I see is erroneously inferring logic based on the specific pieces mentioned without taking account in to the larger picture. These scientific studies are conducted not one off but to support previous widely held beliefs by the scientific community with vastly more focused experience on their topic of research, just wish that HN folks would give them a more credit and practice modesty. Some people on HN don't even bother reading journals or studies being posted here, instead they just blindly hop on the bandwagon with serious holes in the argument.

[subroutine]

You've clearly mistaken my primary qualm. I'm not saying that Orangutans are not fully capable of the things these authors claim. Moreover, I'm not even saying bees aren't capable of conveying learned information. On the contrary, my position is that everything from bees to orangutans to humans have this capacity. In fact, I see this type of communication happening between lots of animals. It seems more like a ubiquitous capacity, than a uniquely human capacity. The authors of this paper don't agree though; instead they are promulgating the idea that "Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to 'talk' about the past".

This is FALSE

In this article...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4350813/

*Chimps used intentional gestures to coordinate with an experimentally-naïve human to retrieve hidden food. In each trial, Experimenter #1 hid a food item anywhere from 3 m to 26 m from the outdoor enclosure under natural cover (e.g. log, soil, leaves, branches) in a trial-unique location in the surrounding woodland, whilst the chimpanzee was watching. The experimenter hid the food and concealed any signs of the hiding place (e.g. breaking up of soil). The chimpanzee could not enter the woodland itself. In order to retrieve the food, the chimpanzee had to recruit the assistance of an uninformed person (Experimenter #2) and direct him to the food item.

The chimpanzees dynamically and flexibly modified their intentional gestures in relation to the naïve experimenter's search efforts towards the hidden food, and successfully guided experimenter #2 to the food item.

You can see in the supplementary videos that experimenter #1 finishes hiding the food at time 4:19...

Screenshot of timestamps: http://bit.ly/ChimpsCanToo

The chimp doesn't greet experimenter #2 until after 4:30 (see same screenshot above). If Orangutans are the only great apes besides humans to ‘talk’ about the past, how the hell is this Chimp communicating with a human to retrieve food it saw buried at some time in the past?