It's not the first time that our closest relatives surprise us with unexpectedly intelligent behaviour. But this time, scientists have found that in certain groups of chimpanzees, located in west Africa, the animals are capable of competently handling a topic that overburdens even some of us.

Whenever a major game title is released, the publisher gives you the option to "pre-order" the game (George Carlin already pointed at the overuse of the prefix "pre" in his airline sketch). Pre-ordering a game is (usually) not any different from just "ordering" a game, except you don't get the game yet. As the sane mind quickly concludes, this is a rather stupid thing to do. Latonya Williams, an economy expert, confirms: "By pre-ordering a game, you take away financial risk from the publisher. Sometimes the publisher gives you a reward for that, like a rebate or exclusive in-game items, but otherwise you basically give a loan with zero interest rate."

An additional drawback of pre-ordering a game is that you don't know what you get. Usually, pre-order phases start long before the game is close to being finished (or what the developer calls so), and therefore no external reviews of the game are available. This has led to some frustration as some pre-orderers have found that a game's quality sometimes does not match the announcements and advertisements of the developer. So by not pre-ordering a game, not only do you get financial advantages, but also you can read external reviews and inform yourself about the game that you are interested in, which can actually lead to the decision to not buy the game.

Now the chimpanzees are clear about this, and most of today's gamers have understood this as well, usually by the aforementioned experience. But there are still many people who pre-order games. We don't know what those people would feel if we told them that they are outperformed by a bunch of west African monkeys when it comes to game shopping. This way, the average chimpanzee estimately saves some hundred dollars per year by not pre-ordering games. If this advanced technique applies to music albums or books as well, is now the essential object of research. Maybe we'll be surprised another time.