We tend to think complex planning is a primate specialty, but a 2017 study found ravens outplanned chimpanzees, orangutans and bonobos at a trading task.

We tend to think complex planning is a primate specialty, but a 2017 study found ravens outplanned chimpanzees, orangutans and bonobos at a trading task.

There is a quiet assumption most of us carry about intelligence: that planning for a future that hasn’t arrived yet is a primate thing, maybe even a human thing. We save for retirement, pack an umbrella, defrost the chicken in the morning for a dinner we haven’t started. Apes, our close relatives, get partial membership in the club. Birds, with their small heads do not but perhaps they should. In July 2017, two researchers at Lund University ran…