At six months old, human infants are still working on sitting up by themselves. But baby orangutans at that age are already developing their engineering skills.
Orangutans build complex sleeping platforms as high as 20 meters in the tree canopy — the equivalent of four stories above the ground — every single evening. The nests are intricate and can include woven elements, pillows, blankets, padding and roofs to protect from rain.
But nest building isn’t instinctive to orangutans — it has to be learned through years of (sometimes hilarious) trial and error that start in infancy, researchers report in the May Animal Behaviour. The finding could be important for
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