Don’t really want to fork out the dough for a GPS device in this terrible economy? No worries, just go abduct a chimp. A pair of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tracked chimps using GPS for 217 days. And what did they find? Chimps tend to navigate using a “geometric mental map” similar to the way a GPS unit works. Previously researchers thought that chimps found their way by landmarks, but thanks to assisted GPS technology which allows devices to achieve a satellite fix in heavily forested regions, we now know differently. So next time you’re lost in a chimp-infested region of the world, you know who (or what) to follow.
Chimpanzees have a built-in mental GPS
Mar 26 at 12:12am by admin