Forget, for a moment, about the ease with which human beings use tools and the inventive ways we express ourselves through art and language. The behavior that really distinguishes humans from other primates is that we can sit quietly in a theater full of strangers — dozens or even hundreds of us — and not fight or impregnate anybody by the end of the show.
“If you put a hundred strange chimpanzees in a room, there would be bloodshed,” says Steven Churchill, a paleoanthropologist at Duke University.
The ability to put up with each other and even cooperate when necessary was a key development in the evolution of our species. It helped our ancestors share knowledge, which allowed them to make ever more elaborate tools and eventually build entire civilizations. Evolutionary anthropologist Brian Hare, also at Duke, is part of a small group of scientists who think they might know ...
