It’s official. Primates aren’t the only animal species besides humans that can learn abstract numerical rules and use them to solve simple math problems. Apparently Pigeons can ace a simple math test and display numerical skills that closely match or even surpass skills that till now were believed to be possessed only by primates, a collection of species closely related to humans that ranges from lemurs to chimpanzees. Many other species show an ability to recognize and utilize numeric values mentally, but apart from humans, only primates showcased any significant ability in reasoning numerically.

Research in 1988 showed that the Rhesus monkey could understand the concept of an “ordinal number”. Given two sets of any object numbering 1 to 9, the Rhesus monkeys were able to, for example, place the objects in ascending order of numbers. Damien Scarf, the lead author of this study on pigeons is also the comparative psychologist at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He confirms that such abilities of numerical reasoning were found across all species of primates, but in a word of caution he also notes that this ability though observed significantly in primates has never been disproved in non primates.

Damien Scarf spent almost a year training a set of three pigeons to set in order three sets of objects. Each set consisted of one to three objects and his colleagues put a simple test of order in front of the three pigeons on a regular basis. The objects were displayed on a computer screen and the pigeons were rewarded with food if they placed the sets of different objects correctly in ascending order of numbers. Regardless of the shapes, the pigeons were able to do this with ease. Though they were trained with only three sets of objects, the pigeons still managed to place the objects in order when presented with a larger number of sets with different shapes.

This is proof that pigeons and primates may share a similar neural mechanism that lets them accomplish these tasks. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution and the consequent diverse species that have resulted from it gave completely different brain structures and organization to different creatures, but yet all species studied seem to solve a problem of numerical reasoning in a similar way. This ability is thought to be common amongst animals, though only detailed studies and testing can prove such abilities in other animal species.