Orangutan smarter than Germans?

Orangutans feature prominently in the BBC series Super Smart Animals.

The K-landnews team was watching the show when one of the scenes led to an outburst of laughter so violent that we became worried about the neighbors.

The scene goes like this. The moderator announces an experiment designed to see if orangutans are so intelligent that they can solve a difficult problem without being shown the solution.

The problem: how to get a peanut out of a narrow, very long plastic tube. Hands cannot be used because the tube is too narrow.

The solution is to make the peanut float.

They then show a laboratory experiment which demonstrates the skill. In this experiment, there is water in the tube, and apes and children need to raise the water level to get at the treats.

Which they eventually do.

Next, they go to the Zoo in Leipzig, Germany, to try it on untrained animals.

There, they set up the experiment for the orangutans, and they set up the same experiment for zoo visitors, outside of the ape house.

You see the setup for the humans and a few seconds of human attempt.

Then, the camera switches to the orangutans while you hear the moderator comment "none of the humans managed to solve the problem".

The orangutan on the other hand heads straight for the water fountain, takes a mouthful of water, spits it into the tube, makes another trip and gets the peanut.

At which point the k-landnews editor turns around and asks: Does that mean that orangutans are smarter than Germans?

We thought this was a great supplement to the nasty Spiegel Online article about how many German students are not intelligent enough to do the A level/K-10 to K-12 part of highschool.

Please, dear BBC, do not go back and change it. Most viewers are not as vicious as TheEditor.