Chimp That Threw Poop At Grandma Is Probably Very Smart: Researchers

That was probably one smart chimpanzee that scooped up a pile of poop at a Grand Rapids, Michigan, zoo over the weekend and flung it at the crowd, hitting a grandmother square in the face. The incident was captured on video and shared on YouTube.

“It got Grandma!” someone is heard exclaiming on the video taken at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids. It has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since it was posted Sunday evening and is garnering the kind of derisive comments you’d expect.

But what you may not know is that researchers studying chimpanzee intelligence say flinging feces — and other objects — is a sign of high-ordered behavior.

Grandma isn’t the only visitor to a zoo who has been hit with ape or monkey poop, and the low-brow comments questioning the primates’ intelligence are typical, according to Bill Hopkins and his team of researchers at Atlanta-based Emory University. But what they discovered is that poop throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence.

The ability to throw, Hopkins and his colleagues determined, is a precursor to speech development in human beings. Both throwing ability and speech development are developed in the left brain hemisphere. So, the better the chimp is at throwing, the more developed the chimp’s brain.

The better poop throwers were also better communicators within their troops, Hopkins and his team found, supporting their conclusion that throwing and speech are related. Flinging poop and other objects is a form of self-expression, the researchers said.

Watch the video of the Grand Rapids zoo incident below.

Photo by Dan Kitwood / Staff / Getty Images News / Getty Images