CAN you tell your friends apart just by sneaking a peek at their backsides? Perhaps not, but chimps turn out to have no trouble matching the faces of chimps they know with photos of their rear ends. Such talent suggests chimps carry around “whole body” mental representations of each other that permit them to assign different body parts to the same individual.
Primatologists Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, showed three male and three female chimpanzees a photo of a chimp’s behind, including its genitals, followed by the faces of two chimps of the…
