Date:January 14, 2016
Source:Cell Press
It almost goes without saying that trust is a defining element of genuine human friendship. Now, a report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on January 14 suggests that the same holds true among chimpanzee pals. The findings suggest that friendship based on trust goes way, way back, the researchers say.
"Humans largely trust only their friends with crucial resources or important secrets," says Jan Engelmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "In our study, we investigated whether chimpanzees show a comparable pattern and extend trust selectively toward those individuals they are closely bonded with. Our findings suggest that they do indeed, and thus that current characteristics of human friendships have a long evolutionary history and extend to primate social bonds."
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