Chimpanzee spatial memory

This really interesting article suggests that forest chimpanzees are capable of prodigious feats of spatial memory in which they remember the exact locations of thousands of trees, and factor into their searches for them how their fruit abundance varies from month to month. I'm impressed by the methods -- the authors needed to follow individual apes for days at a time in a forest in Cote d'Ivoire, notebook and GPS in hand, and they also had to map the locations of tens of thousands of trees.  To test the memory capabilities of the chimps,they compared their observations of real animals to a number of simulations of 'virtual apes' that were carried out using a variety of different kinds of assumptions -- the baseline assumption being that chimpanzees just walk straight until they bump into a tree and then bounce off of it and move in another more or less random direction.  The chimp movements were far from random -- they showed nicely directed search patterns zeroing in on rare trees with abundant fruit.  I once spent a year doing field work in the wilds of Australia, so I have deep respect and awe for anyone who can wander into a thick forest for a year and wander back out again with a nice set of data.  Things don't always go so well.  In my own case, I came out of the field with a set of legs scarred up by gigantic burrowing tics, a deep fear of the Taipan, one of the world's deadliest snakes, and a basic understanding of how not to be eaten by a crocodile--always go into the bush with someone who can't run as fast as you can--which explains why I was such a popular bush-date that year...  But I digress.

What these wild chimpanzees are able to do is obviously a far cry from the abilities of the average urban human being, who not only is unlikely to be able to go back into the forest to find the same tree he found yesterday, but is also somewhat likely to die of exposure before finding his way back to his starting point.  I describe such differences in a fair bit of detail in my book.  But one of the things that interests me a lot about these findings is their contrast with the handful of studies conducted on spatial memory in captive primates who often show a tendency to get lost, especially when they're unleashed on anything like a natural setting.  A question that I've been asked a lot lately is whether I think the human spatial clumsiness results from an unavoidable missing chip of some kind -- that we're just missing a tool that other animals possess -- or whether our spatial skills have just languished through lack of use.  The ape comparison here suggests the latter.  So what would a human being, completely comfortable and at home in natural situations, look like?  How well would they stand up in the kinds of foraging tasks that these forest chimpanzees were challenged with?  Also, given the argument in the BBC writeup of these findings, and the suggestion that the extraordinary spatial memory of the wild chimpanzee can be thought of as a kind of signpost to advanced primate cognition, what do we make of the fact that modern human beings of the urban kind are generally as spatially slow-witted as a caged tamarin?

One final little sidenote.  The authors of the study found some interesting gender differences which did NOT support the standard story that Men are from Mars and Women don't know WHERE they're from -- just as I've been saying in talks and interviews -- there are gender differences but they're much more subtle and interesting than this standard tale.  In the chimpanzee study, females were generally more efficient and spatially savvy searchers.  

I'll be watching for updates from this really interesting group, though what they're doing is tough.  The going will be slow.