A lot of human society requires what’s called a “theory of mind”—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We ...

Great apes appear to build friendships much like humans do. By studying grooming behavior, researchers discovered that chimpanzees and bonobos form close inner circles along with wider networks of ...

Bonobos may be one of our closest cousins but chimpanzees dominated research after Jane Goodall discovered in the 1960s that chimpanzees make and use tools. This finding paved the way for research on ...

Humans are adept combiners. As it turns out, so, too, are bonobos. According to a new study in Science, bonobos can combine their calls a lot like humans can, indicating that a hallmark of human ...

Bonobos, one of humanity’s closest relatives, appear to string together vocal calls in ways that mirror a key feature of the human language, a new study carried out in the forests of the Democratic ...

Bonobos – our closest living relatives – create complex and meaningful combinations of calls resembling the word combinations of humans. This study, conducted by researchers at the University of ...

We humans concoct never-before-heard sentences with ease, embedding phrases within phrases to express the wildest ideas we can dream up (“the purple pangolin that waltzed across the ballroom had a ...

Humans can effortlessly talk about an infinite number of topics, from neuroscience to pink elephants, by combining words into sentences. This is thanks to compositionality: the ability to combine ...

Cooperation is a pillar of human society, promoting an exchange of skills and knowledge between different individuals and social groups. Humans typically do not only cooperate with their own family, ...

Chimpanzees and bonobos are two closely related species of great apes and share much of their DNA with humans. Though they appear similar, they differ significantly in behavior, social structure, and ...