When you go to the grocery store and see the regular employees you’ve seen a hundred times before, you look at their faces and recognize them. When you go home, you recognize your family members by looking at their faces. When you watch this Billy on the Street segment, you see Andy Samberg and Jon Hamm’s faces, and you know who they are.
However, if you had a police-style line-up of your local grocery store employees, your parents, Andy Samberg, and Jon Hamm, but all you were shown was their butts, we doubt you’d fare that well in correctly identifying everybody… unless you were a chimpanzee.Butts have been well-established as an important factor of chimp life, but it turns out that a chimp’s cake by the ocean is a bigger part of their identity than we previously realized: Scientists at the Leiden University in the Netherlands recently discovered that chimps can recognize a specific butt the same way that humans recognize specific faces (via Uproxx). So long as an image isn’t inverted, the scientists have found that chimps really know their butts and can correctly identify them, and they suggested that this is because butts are used for “socio-sexual signaling,” meaning that they’re an important visual factor during mating and courtship.
No matter how much you like buns, we can now just about guarantee that you don’t have as strong an affinity for them as chimps do… or as much as Jake from Adventure Time.
Featured image: SteFou!
