Tag: Chimpanzees

  • Nation & World

    Insight into evolution of cooperation

    Bonobos, one of our closest living animal relatives, show humanlike ability to work together outside social borders in new study

    3 minutes
    Bonobos grooming each other.
  • Nation & World

    Why do we get so picky about friendship late in life? Ask the chimps

    Understanding why older chimps tend to favor small circles of meaningful, established friendships rather than seek new ones may help scientists gain a better picture of what healthy human aging should look like and what triggers this social change.

    5 minutes
    Group of chimps.
  • Nation & World

    New faculty: Martin Surbeck

    A new member of the faculty of the Department of Human and Evolutionary Biology, Martin Surbeck runs one of the few bonobo research sites in the world.

    4 minutes
    A portrait-style photo of professor in front of a large globe
  • Nation & World

    How violence pointed to virtue

    Richard Wrangham’s new book examines the strange relationship between good and evil.

    10 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A mother’s influence

    Researchers have shown, for the first time, that chimpanzees learn certain grooming behaviors from their mothers. Once learned, chimps continued to perform the behavior long after the deaths of their mothers.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cooking up cognition

    A new study suggests that many of the cognitive capacities that humans use for cooking — a preference for cooked food, the ability to understand the transformation of raw food into cooked, and even the ability to save and transport food to cook it — are shared with chimpanzees.

    9 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Right down the middle, explained

    The ability to throw an object with great speed and accuracy is a uniquely human adaptation, one that Harvard researchers say played a key role in our evolution.

    8 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Female chimps treat sticks as dolls

    Researchers at Harvard University and Bates College say female chimpanzees appear to treat sticks as dolls, carrying them around until they have offspring of their own. Young males engage in such behavior much less frequently.

    3 minutes