Brainless Creatures Can Do Some Incredibly Smart Things

There's no denying that human intelligence makes our species stand out from other life on Earth. Our modern brain is an evolutionary feat more than 520 million years in the making, and it is the key to everything that makes us human. But while human brains are extraordinary, we don't have a monopoly on intelligence. "Reserving the term'cognition' for typically human problem-solving abilities ... and dismissing simpler behavior as mechanistic, reflexive, and hard-wired does not do justice to the behavioral complexities of even the simplest of organisms," University of Gronigen psychologist Marc van Duijn and his colleagues write in a widely cited 2006 paper on cognition. You might think of tool use as an exclusively human activity, but macaques on an island off Thailand have learned to use stones as tools to shuck oysters.