By 6 months old, young orangutans are experimenting with construction materials, and by 6 years old, they are building platforms 20 meters in the air.
At six months old, human infants are still working on sitting up by themselves. But baby orangutans at that age are already developing their engineering skills.
To see how orangutans become expert canopy architects, Permana and her colleagues tracked the development of 27 young Sumatran orangutans at the Suaq Balimbing monitoring station in Sumatra, Indonesia, over 13 years. Those observations allowed the researchers to create detailed timeline of how nest building emerges.
At this age, they’re not always strong enough to get the job done. “They’ll hang on with their body weight to try and break it, really pulling, trying to bend it,” Permana says. “They think they’ve made a circle and they let go and it just pings open. You can see they’re kind of surprised, like ‘Oh! It’s not as easy as it looks.’”
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