Boston Globe: How bird brains are shaking up science
Jonah Lehrer in The Boston Globe:
THE NEW CALEDONIAN crow is surprisingly smart about its food. Its favorite insects live in tiny crevices that are too narrow for its beak. So the crow takes a barbed leaf and, using its beak and claws, fashions a primitive hook. It then lowers the hook down into the cracks, almost like a man fishing, and draws up a rich meal. Some scientists even suggest that crows are more sophisticated tool builders than chimps, since they can transmit their knowledge on to successive generations and improve the tools over time. These birds have a culture.
Posted on 
September 25th, 2007 by 
Simon Greenhill
Leave a Reply
Categories
- africa
- americas
- anthropology
- art
- austronesian
- bacteria
- bees
- birds
- bongo-bongoism
- books
- chimpanzees
- conferences
- creationism-is-stupid
- cultural evolution
- culture
- dinosaurs
- disease
- europe
- evolution
- Evolutionary Psychology
- fossils
- genetics
- henry
- horizontal gene transfer
- human prehistory
- humor
- it-was-better-in-my-day
- language
- language preservation
- linguistics
- literature
- microsatellites
- misc
- mtDNA
- music
- neanderthals
- neuroscience
- new-caledonian-crows
- non-human
- ook!
- orangutans
- papers-I-should-read
- people
- phylogenetics
- polynesia
- primates
- psychology
- punctuated equilibrium
- quotes
- religion
- science
- self-improvement
- sexual selection
- six-degrees
- software
- SSTA
- stupidity
- tool-use
- Tree Tuesday
- Uncategorized
- websites
- wednesday-wiki
- Y chromosome
Related Sites
- Anthropology.net
- bayblab
- Computational Biology and Evolution
- Culture evolves!
- Dechronization
- Expelled
- Genomicron
- iPhylo
- John Hawks
- language.psy.auckland.ac.nz
- Of Two Minds
- Primatology.net
- Quentin Atkinson
- simon.net.nz
Email Henry Updates to Me
