The writer is a science commentator
The New Caledonian crow can lay claim to being one of the world’s cleverest birds. It can put two sticks together to make a rod to “fish” for food. The corvid’s dazzling propensity for strategic planning and problem-solving mirrors the cognitive skills of some great apes.
Observations like these have stoked a decades-old debate about whether birds and mammals enjoy a shared cognitive legacy from a common ancestor, which lived more than 300mn years ago — or whether their skillsets evolved separately. Now, research points to the latter, with birds and mammals developing similar cognitive abilities independently, via different evolutionary paths.
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