The Smart Chimps !

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Lower-ranking chimpanzees know how to bargain with their superiors to achieve a fairer split of food, concludes a new study. The same has been published in Evolution and Human Behavior.

But how true is the conclusion? "It looks like you can have a quite successful way of dealing with conflicting interests without any language or any very sophisticated communication ," says Alicia Melis, a psychologist from Germany.

Atop, Melis, along with her colleague presented six pairs of semi-captive chimpanzees with a task that demanded cooperation and compromise, reports New Scientist. On this, Melis and her colleagues corroborates: "It seems that the basic capacities for negotiating over conflicting interests probably arose before we split from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos."

The researcher, however, concludes, by saying, "Chimpanzees are masters at figuring out optimal cooperative strategies, including how to manipulate others to do their bidding."

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