Humans are Apes?

This headline from Yahoo! News caught my attention:

"Like Humans, Other Apes Plan Ahead"

Chimps and orangutans plan for the future just like us.

They are capable of exercising self-control to postpone gratification and to imagine future events via "mental time travel," according to new research from Lunds University Cognitive Science in Sweden.

The skill of future planning was commonly thought to be exclusive to humans, although some studies of apes and crows have challenged this idea, say researchers Mathias and Helena Osvath. Now, for the first time, there is "conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities in non-human species," they say.

The results are detailed online this week in the journal Animal Cognition.

The Osvaths figured this out by showing two female chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and one male orangutan (Pongo abelii) from the Lund University Primate Research Station at the Furuvik Zoo a hose and how to use it to extract fruit soup.

The researchers then tempted the apes (apes are a group that includes chimps, gorillas, orangutans and humans) with their favorite fruit alongside the hose to test their ability to suppress the choice of the immediate reward (favorite fruit) in favor of a tool (the hose) that would lead to a larger reward about an hour later (the fruit soup).

"Other apes"?

Chimps and orangutans are apes, just like us. They plan for the future, just like us.

Is that a surprise?

We're apes. They're apes.
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Cultural aspects of non-human apes

The name "Hominoidea" can be loosely translated as "ape". However, although the superfamily of Hominoidea has always included great apes such as humans, as well as the Hylobatidae, a different connotation of the word "ape" exists in the vernacular. The historical, common usage of the word often excludes humans when referring to apes. Humans are also often excluded from the larger classifications of "animal" and "primate" in common usage, despite belonging to both of these groups as well. The reason for this is that scientific nomenclature and everyday language abide by different rules.

I am not an animal! I am a human being!