He argues that chimpanzees have shown a level of tool manufacture and use comparable to that described by Hunt. Mark Hauser, Ph.D., is an associate professor in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience at Harvard University. Convergent evolution may occur when different species confront similar ecological problems to which there are limited solutions, said Hauser. Under such conditions, similar solutions may arise. At some level there has to be some kind of cognitive computation going on because it's not an automatic sequence.
Animals are smart in their own restricted way.
They are more like idiot savants. Gregory Ball, Ph.D., is a behavioral neuroendocrinologist and associate professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Corvids, the family of birds that includes crows, ravens, and jays, have large brains for their body weight, Ball noted. How that's represented in their brains, how they learn to do this, could give us fascinating insights into the basic brain mechanisms that mediate these activities. But the difficulty comes in that we put conscious thoughts into language.