Chimpanzee With Vision Of The Future

The Chimp is called Santino. The first thing he does each morning, in summer, is go around looking for stones. He collects them within the moat of the installation in the Zoo of Furuvik, in the east of Sweden. To be more exact he pulls them out by force from the concrete structure within which the chimps can get up to their monkey business. Then he puts them in piles of 8 or 10 by the shore of the moat and leave them there.

Hours later, when the zoo opens to the public, and when the first lot of visitors direct themselves towards the chimp's place, Santino would go to the pile of stones, first makes a noisy display of power probably to impress the females of the group, then begins to throw stones at the visitors. His aim is not at all good, as never once had there been anyone hurt by this hostility. I am thinking he might not really want to hit anybody, just to frighten them, to show who is the boss there. In any case, intelligence he doesn't lack.

His case was presented in the scientific magazine: Current Biology. It shows for the first time that chimpanzees are capable of thinking, or anticipating, what might happen in the future and act accordingly. An aptitude attributed to human exclusively.

"Santino convincingly demonstrates that our relatives, the simians, consider the future in a complex way," affirmed Mathias Osvath, investigator of the Lund University in Sweden, who had studied the modus operandi of chimpanzees for more than a decade. "They have highly developed conscience, with mental simulations of potential events. Very probably they have an interior mental picture of events that had happened and what might happen next.

Although Santino's capacity to plan the future is the newest discovery of the investigation, other aspects of his behaviour confirms this highly conscious calculation of sequence of events as people do. For instance, he would immediately stop throwing the stones when he realized that he was being watched by one of the zoo keepers, just like a child would when discovered that he was doing something naughty. Or his capacity to fabricate ammunition from the cement structure.

In winter the water freezes up inside the cement, leaving cavities when the ice is melted. This in not easily seen, but you can detect them by knocking lightly on the surface of the cement to
hear the sound coming from a hollow spot, where it is easier to pull out the stones for his missiles.

Santino was born in Munich in 1978, Transferred to the zoo in Furuvik, Sweden at 5 years old. At 16 he hecame the dominant macho of the group. 2 years later he started his exhibition of throwing stones. He is now 35 years old.

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