In what may put some of us to shame, apes instantly recognize family and friends that they haven’t seen in more than two decades, which is the longest ‘social memory’ in a non-human animal ever documented.

Offering key insights into how human social recognition evolved, the study from Johns Hopkins University came about after researchers noticed how the animals seemed to recognize humans they’d spent time with, even if it had been a long time between visits.

“We tend to think about great apes as quite different from ourselves but we have really seen these animals as possessing cognitive mechanisms that are very similar to our own, including memory,” said lead author Laura Lewis, a biological anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). “And I think that is what’s so exciting about this study.”

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