Planning for future needs is one of the things that humans are relatively good at, though our lack of planning for the day that fossil fuels run out suggests there are limits to that. Nevertheless, we're clearly much better than other animals, where there is little unambiguous evidence for this sort of forethought. But a publication in last week's edition of Science suggests that our fellow primates, in a limited way, can save tools for future use.
The trial was set up so that the chimps and orangutans were given access to rewards that required tools to access them, as well as both appropriate and inappropriate tools. Over the course of several trials, when the primates were made to leave the room, they took the appropriate tools with them at over double the rate that they grabbed the wrong ones. This occurred even though most weren't holding tools when they were cued to leave the room; instead, they grabbed them on their way out. Rates of planning were equally high when a 14-hour delay was inserted between obtaining and using the tools. To check for the association between utility and planning, the researchers ran a parallel experiment where they gave the primates rewards if they carried the correct tool, but did not require them to use the tool. The test subjects didn't get this at all, and even those that succeeded once did not repeat that success in further trials.
Overall, these tests seem to show that, on at least a limited level, our fellow primates can recognize a useful tool, know to hang on to it, and will transport it between locations in the expectation that it will be equally useful in the future. In contrast, they were unable to grasp saving the tool for use as currency. It was amusing to note that two orangutans in the study learned how to short-circuit the tests. They took to carrying the wrong tool after recognizing that they could always break a piece off in order to convert it to a useful one. The authors decided to discard those results in the analysis.