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Orang-utans use leaves to lie about their size

edyong | August 4, 2009

You'll sometimes hear people lowering their voices to make themselves sound tougher or more commanding. We're not the only ones - it seems that our close relatives, the orang-utans, pull the same trick, and they use tools to do it. Madeleine Hardus from the University of Utrecht has found preliminary evidence that young orang-utans use leaves for deception, in order to make lower-pitched calls that seem to come from a much larger animal. While many animals are accomplished tool-users, most use their utensils to find food. A few populations of orang-utans, living in Borneo, are the only…