Even now when I look at bees it's hard to imagine that these tiny nervous little insects could be intelligent. Yet in all this apparent chaos there is a tremendous amount of order. Bees are not behaving randomly they are going about the task of solving a series of specific problems. They spend the first few days feeding the queen and taking care of her. And then they spend a few days building honeycomb in the hive. And then a few days guarding the hive's entrance and then finally several weeks gathering food from flowers. These are all clever things and yet this behaviour is driven by biological cues. All through the life of a bee an innate sensitivity to certain cues helps guide its behaviour. And this is by no means an exception this is the rule in the animal world. And it makes sense too. If the behaviour is sufficiently predictable and the cues are sufficiently predictable it makes sense for an animal not to reason out what it ought to do but to simply respond automatically.
A good example of this is tits open milk bottles because instinctively they peel back bark to look for grubs. Gould concluded that unlike humans the short lifespans of many insects and animals means they simply don't have enough time to work out solutions to problems. Their apparently intelligent behaviour is just a response to a series of biological cues. However there are animals that do appear to display a capacity for intelligent problem-solving.
Research into one species - chimpanzees - has begun to reveal greater capabilities that go beyond pure instinct. Writer Danny Wallace went to Uganda to find out more. He was keen to investigate an experiment to test a chimp's ability to solve a complex problem. This box of bananas placed away from the cage poses a tricky problem. Ah. I see what you've done. 'To get the bananas to come towards me I would have to pull both ends of the rope. 'But they were too far apart.' Right OK. I can't. Diana? Will you be another chimp please? Chimp-cam. 'I could see that if I didn't get Diana involved I'd get no bananas at all. 'And that didn't bear thinking about.' One two three. We did it we got the bananas. Now for the chimps. Chimp one has a rational choice. Share the bananas with chimp two or get no banana at all. Three two one. Release the chimp. OK. So he's going a bit mad. Chimp one can't get the bananas. Chimp two is going mad chimp one is wondering what's going on. Oh he has let him out. T
hat's amazing. That's incredible. Chimp one he's very happy and off they go. That was brilliant. That was quicker than me. The chimp appeared to be making a thoughtful decision suggesting that chimps are intelligent enough to co-operate. A key human trait. Yet human intelligence still sets us apart from our closest
evolutionary cousins. Thank you for taking part in this experiment. This is for you. Scientists have delved deep into our prehistoric past to try to find out when we developed superior intelligence. When did our ancestors cease being brute animals and first become truly human? When did we learn to think?
Thinking is the defining trait of humankind. It has given us machines. Technology. Power. No other animal has the ability to look at the world outside and transform it. Where all other animals live from day to day we alone plan ahead. Dream. And create. Find the day we learned to think and you would have identified perhaps the single most important moment in human history. But it was not going to be simple. Thinking leaves no traces. There are no fossilised thoughts waiting to be dug out of the ground and dated. It was like investigating a murder scene without a body. So scientists had to look for indirect clues. Not fossils but other evidence for when thought began. And then they realised that thought must have come hand-in-hand with something else. What are we going to look for first of all that's going to give us evidence that humans were behaving in a modern way? So we look in a way for proxies.
But there was one kind of evidence archaeologists could look for. The obvious line of evidence is art. When you get unquestionable art that's widespread and common I think you can say you're dealing with people just like us. Only humans create and can make sense of art. I'm sure that dozens of dogs have walked down this street in the past years and perhaps not a one has glanced up in awe or wonder and thought to himself what does this mean? For a dog this is colour on a wall. Perhaps even less than that. But to a human being a painting is far more than just a collection of colours.
An expression of thought. Suddenly what they had to look for was clear. Discover the earliest forms of human art and you would have found the day we learned to think. At Blombos on the east coast of South Africa anthropologist Chris Henshilwood had been quietly excavating his prehistoric cave for over a decade. This is Blombos cave here. A very special find. We're really looking at what has been left here almost as if it was put down here yesterday. As they dug down through the floor of the cave his team were going back to an ancient time of human habitation tens of thousands of years ago
. We came down onto this layer you can see over here which really was quite remarkable. On the surface were lying the most beautifully made artefacts. Bone points spear points as well. And immediately I realised we had gone back a very long way in time. The beautifully crafted objects were dated to over years ago. But there was still not proof the people in the cave were thinking people like us. One type of item started appearing over and over again. We noticed large numbers of pieces of ochre. pieces of ochre in the old levels alone. Then one day Henshilwood found a piece of ochre that was different from the rest. We found this piece of ochre brushed up the side and there was this absolutely remarkable pattern revealed. There was huge excitement you can imagine. The ochre piece appeared to have been marked with a clear image. What seemed like an abstract geometric pattern.
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