A recent study published in the journal Science reveals that when it comes to toddlers and apes, each has its own talent. Hundreds of chimpanzees and orangutans and hundreds of two-year-old children competed in demonstrating their skills in a series of tests.

While chimps proved better when it came to spatial and counting tests, children demonstrated superiority in social skills such as imitating others to solve a problem.

Though it was known that human brains are three times bigger than the apes’, if humans were innately better at a large number of mental tasks remained an issue to be proved. This was the question that engendered the research led by Esther Herrmann, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The study was conducted on 105 children in Germany, 106 chimpanzees in the Republic of Congo and Uganda, and 32 Indonesian orangutans, whom were given the same battery of tests.

“We compared the three species to determine which abilities and skills are distinctly human,” Herrmann said.

The rewards used during the tests were little toys for children and raisins for the apes.

The most simple physical skills didn’t make any difference between toddlers and their hairy cousins, both species being almost equally able to point the right cup under which a treat was hidden or to choose the plate that bore the largest number of rewards on it. However, the chimps’ choices proved more accurate after someone slid the cups to new positions. This skill, of course, is essential in wildlife, as Herrmann explained: “Apes have to anticipate moving prey, and find trees again.”

Apes outstripped children at counting tests, too. Presented with cups that had three, respectively two raisins, chimps knew that after adding two more raisins in both cups, the one that had three raisins would contain more treat than the other. “They had to add it in their head,” Dr. Herrmann justified. This part of the test highlights that basic mathematical skills have long been developed in a common ancestor of humans and chimps.

Humans scored far better at social skill tests, with a 74 percent precision, compared to the apes, who scored correctly 33 percent of the time. These kind of tests involved, for example, acknowledging that if a person pointed to a cup or a box, that represented the one with the treat.

The conclusions of the tests suggest that humans don’t posses better skills at most mental skills, but they developed certain skills linked to social interaction that resulted in a specific learning and communication culture.