In this book, Carel van Schaik, a highly regarded Dutch primatologist now at Duke University, concludes that "intelligence is ... socially constructed during development." This won't surprise you--until you realize that he is referring not to humans but to orangutans, the large red apes of south Asia. Van Schaik proposes that the discovery of orangutan culture can provide a resolution to a long-standing puzzle: Why are apes so smart? Perhaps the complexities of great ape social relationships selected for large brains. But orangutans challenge this "social intelligence" hypothesis: in the wild, they mostly travel about by themselves, yet they are at least as smart as chimpanzees.

Van Schaik thinks that social factors are indeed pivotal in explaining orangutan intelligence, but not in the way proposed by the social intelligence hypothesis. In a beautifully written, compelling narrative that reads like a detective story, he weaves together several threads of evidence to argue that orangutan intelligence is intimately related to technological innovations that are passed down through social learning.

This article was originally published with the title Orangutan Technology.

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