Great apes - chimps, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas - are our nearest relatives. They have some of the biggest brains in proportion to body size of any animals but how similar are their minds to ours? Few would deny that apes experience emotions like ours: love and grief, rage and pleasure, fear and glee. We accept their ability to feel, but what about their ability to think? Just how smart are they? They are among the few animals to have culture, ideas and technologies that spread from one individual to another. So why does human culture move at warp speed while ape culture changes little over the generations? Ape Genius presents a lively synthesis of new research that reveals the critical gap between ape minds and our own. Both apes and humans learn from others by observation but only humans show other individuals new skills. We are in a league of our own because our minds have specific cognitive and emotional skills that allow us teach other.

• 1 disc; 52 minutes
• © 2010