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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher and Daljata.

If you've ever hosted a mouse as a house guest, you know they can be incredibly clever

at finding your food, and that makes sense. They had to become better in traits like problem-solving

because we became better at hiding our food from them. Anya Guntar is with the Max Planck Institute

in Germany. She says that battle of the minds has made mice craftier over time.

The longer the mice live with humans, the better they are at problem-solving.

You see, there are more than a dozen subspecies of house mice worldwide,

and each began cohabitating with humans at different times in our evolutionary history.

Take, for example, it began rating human pantries around 12,000 years ago.

Moose musculos musculos. Our relationship with them began some 8,000 years ago.

And moose musculos cazdanios. That one is a relative newcomer,

which began cohabitating only three to five thousand years ago.

And that spread, in evolutionary life histories among the three groups,

gave Guntar's team an opportunity. They gathered 150 mice with constituents from all three groups

and tested them with seven different food puzzles. Each puzzle was baited with a mealworm,

which the mice could only get by pushing or pulling a lid, for example,

...