Poop-throwing chimps have more smarts
While throwing one’s feces is generally looked down upon as an immature behavior, put yourself in the position of chimps being teased by creatures of whom they’re probably questioning the freedom of and there’s a good chance you’ll come to the same conclusion as Emory University’s Bill Hopkins and his team: these guys aren’t as dumb as they seem.
Oddly enough, Hopkins found that throwing ability and communication appear to be linked in the brain.
[T]hey found that chimps that both threw more and were more likely to hit their targets showed heightened development in the motor cortex, and more connections between it and the Broca’s area, which they say is an important part of speech in humans. The better chimp throwers, in other words, had more highly developed left brain hemispheres, which is also, non-coincidently, where speech processing occurs in people.
Such findings led the term to suggest that the ability to throw is, or was, a precursor to speech development in human beings.
The chimps’ aim was not a result of improved motor abilities but those with more accuracy were better communicators with other chimpanzees and, one could argue, other species as well; after all, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what a handful of crap to the head is trying to say.
Full story at PhysOrg via Neatorama.
Photo credit: Fotolia
