Thursday, December 1, 2011

Throwing linked to intelligence in chimps

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From CBS News:

"Any zoo-goers so unlucky as to be on the receiving end of a poop-tossing chimpanzee may be excused for taking a dim view of that particular form of monkey mayhem. But don't let the gross-out aspect of the situation cloud your judgment about the perpetrator: New research suggests that a primate's ability to throw an object is actually a solid indicator of intelligence.

"Bill Hopkins of Emory University and his collaborators make that argument in a new paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Among other things, they find major overlap between brain areas which distinguish right- and left-handed throwing chimpanzees and the regions of the cortex involved in language processing by humans. The researchers concluded that the chimps which were better throwers also possessed more developed left brain hemispheres, the area where we process speech."

Read the full article at CBN News.

Related:
Gestures may point to speech origins
Brain trumps hand in Stone Age tool study
Top 10 facts about non-verbal communication

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