Chimpanzees, when faced with a problem, such as how to reach high-hanging bananas using long sticks, often sit and do nothing for a period of time before suddenly coming to a solution. This phenomenon, known as the “Koehler Moment,” was first described by the renowned primatologist, Wolfgang Koehler. The term “Koehler Moment” is used to describe the sudden insight that chimpanzees experience in these situations.

Female chimpanzees engage in “mother-daughter” play during childhood: they locate sticks approximately the size of a newborn, carry them in their arms, gently hold them, tuck them into bed, and sing lullabies.

Chimpanzees use their buttocks to recognize each other, in a similar way that humans use facial features to do so.

In the Czech zoo, a display screen was installed in the chimp enclosure, which showed the life of chimps from another zoo. The local chimps began to bring food to the screen in order to have a snack while watching this “reality show.” Well, it is not without reason that they are considered human-like.

A chimpanzee is smaller than a human, but about one and a half times stronger than him.

The longest phrase spoken by a chimpanzee in sign language was 16 words: “Give me an orange, let me eat an orange, I’ll eat an orange, let me eat an orange, give me you” — they were uttered by the chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky, who studied sign language as part of an experiment at Columbia University.

If you teach a chimpanzee a more efficient method of opening nuts and then introduce it to a group of chimpanzees that use a less efficient method, the individual chimpanzee that has learned the more efficient technique will likely stop using it in order to conform to the group’s less efficient practices.

Chimpanzees can play Rock-paper-scissors as well as a four-year-old child. “Paper” always defeats “rock”, while “rock” defeats “scissors” and “scissors” defeats “paper”. The researchers believe that the ability to understand such circular relationships may be the key to solving more complex problems for chimpanzees and forming networks of social relationships.

A psychologist took a baby chimpanzee and raised it with his infant son to test whether a chimpanzee could develop as a human if placed in human conditions. Eventually, the development of chimpanzees stopped at a stage called the “cognitive wall.” When the monkey hit this “wall”, no further training, training or attempts at education could add more intelligence to him than a chimpanzee should have.

Humans are as hairy as chimpanzees. We have the same number of hair follicles, but the hair itself has thinned and lightened in the process of evolution.

Humans and chimpanzees are closely related species, but is it possible to cross them, such as crossing dogs and wolves? Professor Ilya Ivanov asked himself this question in the late 1920s. While in Africa, he conducted a number of experiments on this kind of crossing, introducing human sperm into the organisms of female chimpanzees.

Ivanov did not achieve any results confirming that crossing is still possible — female chimpanzees did not get pregnant. However, the professor did not give up — he planned to continue his experiments at the Sukhumi Zoo and even found several women who were ready to serve science by inseminating themselves with monkey sperm. But Ilya Ivanov was arrested in 1930, and in 1932 he died, as a result of which the experiments were interrupted.

Chimpanzees, after eating figs or beans, fart so loudly and often that researchers find them in the forest by their sounds and smell.

The bonobo chimpanzee is the closest living animal species to humans. The genome of humans and bonobos coincides by 93.6%.

The skull bones of human and chimpanzee species are structurally similar, although chimpanzees exhibit more rapid jaw growth compared to humans, who experience greater brain development.

The human genetic code has been completely sequenced or, in other words, read. Recently, scientists have deciphered the DNA of chimpanzees in the same way. Now researchers can accurately talk about the similarity of the two species.

The chimpanzee is indeed the closest to humans, if we talk about the genetic line. Scientists have calculated that the total genome is on average 94 percent. Sometimes this kinship rate reaches 98 percent.

At the same time, men and women differ more in their genetic code than male chimpanzees and men. That is, the structure of DNA in men is more similar to the structure of chimpanzee DNA than the DNA of an individual of their own species. In some cases, representatives of the human species have differences that further bring their DNA closer to the primate code.

Scientists from Harvard University has concluded in a series of experiments that chimpanzees can be taught to cook raw food, NBC News reports. At the same time, primates, like humans, are able to postpone the satisfaction of hunger until the food is cooked.

The study was conducted in the Republic of the Congo, where biologists offered chimpanzees to taste sweet potato fruits in raw and boiled form. It turned out that monkeys prefer cooked vegetables. After that, the scientists showed the primates two devices. With the help of one of the bottoms, they could cook sweet potatoes, and the second left it raw.

The chimpanzees quickly realized how both devices worked and began to cook their own food. The same thing happened in experiments using raw carrots. Scientists note that monkeys did not learn to use fire during their development. However, if they are provided with a heat source, they are quite capable of mastering cooking.

Another important discovery of scientists was that chimpanzees are able to postpone the satisfaction of hunger and wait until the food is cooked. This conclusion is based on the fact that monkeys preferred to cook food even when they realized that it took more time than if they ate it raw.

The authors of the study believe that the results of the experiment are important for understanding how human cognitive abilities developed during evolution. So, scientists concluded that if monkeys can learn to cook, then Australopithecines were even more able to do it. In addition, they suggest that it was boiled food, which is easier to digest, that contributed to the development of the large hemispheres of the brain in our ancestors.