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[Source:  Yahoo News/Live Science]

Chimpanzees and humans are fairly close cousins, evolutionarily speaking. But a new study finds they lack something that we have (besides written language and hairlessness): a desire to work together.

When all other things are equal, 3-year-old children prefer to do a task collaboratively rather than alone, while chimpanzees show no such preference, said study researcher Yvonne Rekers, a cognitive scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

“We expected that difference between human and chimpanzee cooperation, because we can see it nowadays,” Rekers told LiveScience. “Humans collaborate in a larger variety of contexts and in more complex forms.”

However, that leaves the question: Why these differences in cooperation? Cognitive abilities may be at the root of some of them, Rekers said, but motivation could matter as well.

Working together

To investigate the motivations of both species, the researchers chose a task that both groups would willingly undertake: pulling a rope to get a food reward. The children in the study got gummy frogs as their treat, while the chimpanzees got bananas.

Fifteen chimps and 24 children were introduced to the same experimental set-up: a room containing both a single end of rope and a doubled-over rope with two available ends. The 3-year-olds and the chimps were all taught that by pulling both ends of the doubled-over rope at the same time, they could draw a food-laden board toward them, delivering a batch of gummy frogs or bananas.

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