The school summer holidays are upon us. Cue the annual expectation that parents will conjure up six weeks of affordable, memory-making fun while holding down a job and hanging on to their sanity. Baking, picnics and den building may be wholesome, but they also involve spending time with your children. By day four, the den starts to look less like a place of adventure and more like somewhere to hide till September.

The answer, of course, is the playdate: the socially sanctioned art of abdicating responsibility for a few precious hours so you can finish a cup of tea while it’s still warm. And it turns out that humans aren’t the only ones to have discovered the benefits of a little parental outsourcing. A recent study suggests that orangutan mothers also arrange playdates for their offspring.

Orangutans are a solitary species, with their own territories and a strong preference for personal space. Mothers give birth to a single infant, which they raise for six to seven years – all without a partner, screens or the godsend that is Bluey. Given this solitary lifestyle, you might expect the ginger giants to avoid encounters with other youngsters. Not so.

Researchers studied 30,000 hours’ worth of observations from 31 wild Bornean mother-offspring pairs and found that mums made trips........

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