Cognitive neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, Andreas Nider, is making some lofty claims, and for good reason.
He says that his research into the cognitive ability of corvids has proven that we humans are not alone in our ability to detect geometry. Crows can do it, too.
It’s no secret that crows are highly intelligent creatures. To test just how intelligent, Nider and his team showed two carrion crows a group of six shapes on a computer monitor. The birds had to pick out (or, in this case, peck) the shape that didn’t belong.
They started off easy. They presented five moon shapes and then one flower. The crows nailed it. Then things got a little bit more difficult by presenting sets of shapes that were roughly the same but still contained differences, like how squares and parallelograms are similar but different.
We can tell the difference, but could a crow?
Yep. Without breaking a sweat. According to Professor Nieder, this is the first time any non-human species has flexed the brainpower to recognize geometric regularity—aka spotting the odd shape out based on angles and symmetry, not just “one of these things is not like the others.”
Up until now, we thought humans were the only ones with this innate grasp of clean geometry. Even baboons, our evolutionary cousins, bombed the test.
The findings, published in Science Advances, suggest that human math skills might rest on an ancient foundation of animal-level spatial reasoning. Our entire concept of mathematics might be innate, lying somewhere deep within our primordial minds.
If we have it, and now we know crows might have it, maybe dolphins, octopuses, and any number of animals we consider intelligent might also have it. Nieder is almost certain of it. “I hope that my colleagues are looking into other species,” he told NPR.
“I’m pretty sure they may find that other intelligent animals can also do this.”
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