For being our closest genetic relatives, there’s still plenty that science doesn’t know about chimpanzees. We know they’re smart, but what makes some chimps smarter than others? Though environment was thought to be the driving factor, researchers at Georgia State University found that it’s not really the answer: Just like humans, chimpanzees acquire some of their intelligence from genetics.

“Intelligence runs in families,” said Dr. William Hopkins, professor in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Georgia State and research scientist in the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. “The suggestion here is that genes play a really important role in their performance on tasks while non-genetic factors didn’t seem to explain a lot. So that’s new.”

Humans also inherit some of their intelligence, of course, but it’s mainly an issue of capacity, or capability. At a young age, our IQs are gradually determined by a number of factors, including formal education and socioeconomic status. Unless chimpanzees have developed universities that primatologists have yet to discover, how smart they end up is largely determined by how smart their parents were.

“Chimps offer a really simple way of thinking about how genes might influence intelligence without, in essence, the baggage of these other mechanisms that are confounded with genes in research on human intelligence,” Hopkins said.

Hopkins and his team studied 99 chimps, ranging in age from 9 to 54 years old. Using quantitative genetics analysis, he was able to determine the degree to which genetics contributed to their performance on 13 cognitive tasks.

“We wanted to see if we gave a sample of chimpanzees a large array of tasks,” he said, “would we find essentially some organization in their abilities that made sense. The bottom line is that chimp intelligence looks somewhat like the structure of human intelligence.”

While environmental factors inevitably played a part (a chimp raised in isolation would be necessarily less capable, for instance), genes proved to be a major component. In a way, it’s like peeking into a world where there’s no such thing as schooling, or economic classes – if armed only with our inherited intelligence, who would rise to the top?

Moving forward, Hopkins would like to expand his study, including both a larger sample size and examining which specific genes drive intelligence.