"We are 98.77 percent chimpanzee," Tetsuro Matsuzawa told me last week. "We are their evolutionary neighbors."
Matsuzawa's extraordinary work at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University recently made headlines all over the world. In case you missed it, Matsuzawa's chimps beat humans at a memory game played on a computer. It was the first time that chimps had been shown to have superior brain power to humans — at least in this particular test.
Matsuzawa said that chimp intelligence was underestimated. Other researchers I have spoken to have said the same. If scientists haven't noticed how much potential chimps have, it's because of the way they are kept, and the tests that we give them. (Not to mention the fact that we see ourselves as uniquely different — but more of this later.)