A further advance in understanding the value of butt recognition:
“Rhesus Macaques Form Preferences for Brand Logos Through Sex and Social Status Based Advertising,” M. Yavuz Acikalin, Karli K. Watson, Gavan J. Fitzsimons, and Michael L. Platt, PloS ONE, vol. 13, no. 2, 2018, e0193055. (Thanks to David Austin for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Stanford University, Stanford, the University of Colorado Boulder, Duke University, and the University of Pennsylvania, report:
“we asked whether rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) show choice behavior that is similar to humans in response to sex and social status in advertising. Our results show that monkeys form preferences for brand logos repeatedly paired with images of macaque genitals and high status monkeys.”
This new study fails to mention the Ig Nobel Prize-winning research that made it possible. The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for anatomy was awarded to Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. They describe their findings in the study “Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception” [Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99–103, 2008].