Curious kids

An experiment, conducted on wild orangutans, uncovers the conditions that spark curiosity. A sumatran orangutan in its natural habitat in Indonesia. Suaq - Humans like to discover. Presented with something we've never seen before, most of us will be compelled to explore and learn more about it. The same can't exactly be said for our closest living relatives - the great apes. Although decades of studies have shown that captive chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans will eagerly explore unfamiliar objects in a laboratory, great apes have rarely been observed in these encounters in the wild. As such, almost nothing is known about how great apes respond to novelty in the natural habitats in which they evolved.