Can animals play pretend? It took a tea party with a bonobo to find out. In a set of experiments, a team of researchers offered a bonobo named Kanzi invisible juice and grapes, presenting the tests as ...

Bonobos—our closest living relatives—create complex and meaningful combinations of calls resembling the word combinations of humans. The study has investigated the vocal behavior of wild bonobos in ...

Bonobos may even have better social intelligence than chimpanzees. In experiments where various animals were presented with upside-down cups with a treat hidden under one of them, chimpanzees kept ...

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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Tupac, a young male bonobo scratching his head. Lukas Bierhoff, Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project Humans can effortlessly talk ...

A few captive bonobos recently faced a seemingly simple task: locate a tasty snack hidden under one of three cups. Because bonobos are brainiacs, pinpointing the cup with the treat should have been no ...

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 ...