A species of crow native to islands east of Australia has long wowed scientists with its intelligence, and now it has shown it can solve at least one puzzle as well as the average 7-year-old child, scientists reported recently.
Like other research on the cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals, the study sheds light on the evolution of intelligence and whether disparate cognitive capacities develop in lockstep or at radically different rates between species. The results suggest that an understanding of cause and effect evolved fairly early.
By studying the cognitive abilities of other animals, "we can assess the factors which may have led to the evolution of different cognitive mechanisms, in particular the flexible problem solving, or intelligence, that we find in certain groups in the animal kingdom," said biologist Sarah Jelbert of the University of Auckland. "Understanding this could in turn help us to piece together the evolution of cognition in our own species."