Humans are an interesting mixture of altruism and competition. We work together well at times and at others we will fight to get our own way. To try to explain these conflicting tendencies, ...

To get treats, apes eagerly pointed them out to humans who didn't know where they were, a seemingly simple experiment that demonstrated for the first time that apes will communicate unknown ...

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 ...

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 – 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 ...

The peeps, hoots and grunts of wild bonobos, a species of great ape living in the African rainforest, can convey complex thoughts in a way that mirrors some elements of human language, a new study ...

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 ...

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 ...