A couple of days ago, the world's most famous female chimpanzee named Ai (愛) passed away at the age of 49. It's about over 80 years old in human life. She was known as a genius chimpanzee. How intelligent she was?

When she was one year old, she was moved to The Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, where she spent her entire life. In 1989, she tried to escape from her cage with another chimpanzee named Akira by unlocking the door. They also opened the key of orangutan's cage. This news spreaded all over Japan, and it made them very famous. Her son, Ayumu is also genius and he competed university students to memorize orders of random numbers. The participants were shown the numbers from one to nine in a random order for just 0.5 seconds and were required to remember them. Could you do that in the blink of an eye? Most college students struggled, while Ayumu was almost perfect.

Why is this possible for chimpanzees? Compared to human-beings, they are better at instant memories than humans, while humans are better at imagination.

Ai understood many kanji (one of Japanese characters), numbers, and colors as well. She could paint too. Rsearchers have been researching where chimpanzee's minds come from, so they didn't separate Ai and Ayumu. Normally, baby chimpanzees in the Primate Research Institute were raised by humans, but they let Ai raise her son herself. As a result, Ayumu learned kanji, numbers, colors, and more from his mother just like human's babies learn from their mothers.

It's said that chimpanzees understand death. You sometimes see mothers still holding dead babies, or some group members don't leave from the dead body in the group. Does Ayumu understand his mother's death? Researchers have kept researching about Ayumu.

If you're curious about these chimpanzees, you can watch some videos here and here.

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