Chimps Shed Light on How Humans Learned to Share

A group of chimpanzees at a research site frequently share hunting tools and food with each other, something that's widely regarded as a defining characteristic of human behavior.

The finding may shed light on how the earliest humans first started sharing, according to study author Jill Pruetz, a professor of anthropology at Iowa State University.

She and her colleagues observed chimpanzees at the Fongoli research site in Senegal and recorded 41 cases of the chimpanzees sharing either wild plant foods or hunting tools with each other.

Previous studies have documented chimps sharing meat, but this is the first to describe the sharing of items other than meat among chimps that were not related...

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