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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Previously I heard about crows in Japan leaving nuts on the way of the cars to crash them when traffic lights are red and collecting them the next cycle. This summer I witnessed the exact same thing when I was driving through a particularly jammy traffic light here in Europe.

Are these crows inventing the method over and over again independently, like scientists finding the same thing at the same time in different parts of the world? Is this some very basic instinct that the crows evolved into? Are they teaching each other and now the Euro crows using Japanise tech? Fascinating creatures.

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Exact thing happened to me one or two days ago. I was driving home and on a small street near my apartment a crow flew out of the bushes and dropped something right in front of the car and then it landed on the other side of the street. When I looked back in the mirror, the crow had gone back to collect what looked like a walnut.

On a semi-related note, magpies are also doing really well in that race. End of last year I started leaving oatmeal in a bottle cap on my terrace and every morning a magpie came to eat it every single day over the course of 2 months. And every evening when I came back home I had a handful of sticks, stones and berries left somewhere. No idea what I was supposed to do with them but thanks magpie I guess...

I thought magpies were supposed to be thieves, but you seem to have an honest one that pays for its food.

Yeah, otherwise it could have stolen cash and paid for the food but it's cutting away the middle man all the way.

For what it's worth, crows in Central Europe have been doing this for decades. They (carrion crows) used to do it outside my childhood home in Austria ~25 years ago. (Very light traffic, so no traffic lights; they just put some nuts in place when they heard a car coming.) They would generally first attempt to crack the nuts simply by dropping them onto the road from a height. I guess they left the ones that didn't crack on impact at terminal velocity for the cars to deal with.

There may well have been multiple independent discoveries, and passing the skill on between individuals and generations has probably made it near-ubiquitous now.

I read an article about crows in Australia killing a very poisonous frog. They are able to teach each other was the conclusion of that article. I don't have time atm to find the article.

It’s mentioned in this article: http://theconversation.com/eat-your-heart-out-native-water-r...

I wonder if what makes humans "intelligent" is exactly this. Plus we have a 70-90 years of life. Which is long enough to learn and do stuff, compare that to 10-15 years for your average crow.

We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.

Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.

That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.

tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.

I'd say it still takes a lot of intelligence for all that training to be effective. If we were much dumber it wouldn't even help. Long life is probably necessary but definitely not sufficient.

My 10 year old can start a fire, create a shelter, gather/sterilize water, hunt, trap, clean game and cook it. Humans are scary smart compared to other life and can easily pickup survival skills, manipulate their environments to suit them, even as a child.

To be fair, many animals can create a shelter, gather water, hunt, and so on when they're ten months old ;)

Sounds like a good theory, until you think about animals like parrots and turtles. Both of those have lifespans that are about as long as that of humans, and no doubt they are very intelligent (esp. pronounced with parrots), but not smart enough to be able to support your hypothesis.

How so? My hypothesis is that if a human is not exposed to this curricula of learning, he'll be close to these animals in intelligence. I don't know of any such humans. I also don't know of any such parrot that was given a learning program for 25 years.

We don't really know what they'd be capable of. Not having opposable thumbs is a pretty massive handicap compared to primates.

a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training

If by "bring food to the table" you mean "earn a good salary at a very specialised job", maybe -- although 21 years is more like it.

But for literally bringing food to the table, basic survival skills, you're talking more like 8-10 years.

I’ve seen the same behavior in the Pacific Northwest. It seems to be widespread.

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