This suggests that they can think or plan ahead in a limited way

This suggests that they can think, or plan ahead in a limited way. They are also the only species that uses a wide range of tools, from stone hammers and anvils to crack nuts, to leaf napkins for tidying themselves up after a messy meal.The other theory about the evolution of primate intelligence has to do with the way animals in complex social groups interact with one another. This social intelligence has to cope with the occasional deception of one animal by another, which some scientists call the ``Machiavellian hypothesis'' Some even articulate their deceptions. Koko, an adult gorilla who has been taught the rudiments of American sign language, often blames the researchers who work with her for things she has done. When she sat on the sink and broke it, she signed, "Kate [her keeper] there bad." She also threatens people who annoy her with her toy crocodile, evidently displaying the childlike trait of pretending that something is real, which is an aspect of deception.Work by Professor Robin Dunbar from the psychology department at Liverpool University strengthens this ``social'' argument for the evolution of intelligence.

The neocortex, the ``thinking'' part of the brain, is larger in primates that live in large groups and have to keep track of and interact with many individuals. Furthermore, he says that the larger the neocortex is in relation to the brain, the more complex the social life of that species.Dr Rob Barton, from the anthropology department at Durham University, also believes social interaction has been the driving force in the evolution of primate intelligence. "It seems fairly obvious that social interaction requires the integration of lots of different information at once - being able to recognise different facial expressions and react accordingly, for example - and that requires massive parallel processing. Getting food is a series of sequential tasks which are easy."Dr Byrne is nevertheless sticking to his guns. "I'd put the question the other way round; [non-ape] monkeys live in highly complex social groups, more complex than the groups gorillas live in, or even chimps.

It just doesn't make sense to say that the groups apes live in are more challenging." So why have apes shot ahead of monkeys in the intelligence stakes? "What is revealing are the things that apes do and monkeys do not," he says.And although the groups chimps live in might be numerically smaller than those of some species of monkey, they have the richest social lives of any primate bar us and the pygmy chimps. Chimps and pygmy chimps began to evolve six million years ago, gorillas split off from the great ape lineage earlier, and orangutans even earlier than gorillas. Traditionally, because of our relative proximity in geological time, we look at chimps when we're searching for clues to how our ancestors behaved Yet there is nothing chimps can do that orang-utans can't. Until we can pinpoint differences between the great apes' mental abilities, Dr Byrne believes that we should go much further back in time to find the wellspring of human intelligence.

The "forest man" swinging in the trees of Borneo today could be the greatest living key to our own mysterious past !. FOR PROUST it was taste, a Madeleine dunked in tea, that recalled the remembrance of things past. For Baudelaire it was smell, sensuously celebrated in his poem "Perfume": Reader, have you sometimes breathed in Drunkenly and with slow gourmandisePicks the exquisite flower of memory.Perfume is enormously evocative: who can forget the scent their mother wore, or the perfume or aftershave worn by a lover? A single sniff can transport the mind over years and miles. Russian astronauts went into space with phials of essential oils to remind them of earth, and from its earliest recorded use perfume was believed to put man in touch with the heavens.The word perfume comes from the Latin per fumum, "through smoke".