Kids share, chimps stash
A legacy of foraging together may prod humans to divvy up spoils evenly
By Bruce Bower
Young kids have no problem saying mine and gimme. Yet even greedy rug rats go out of their way to share cool stuff equally if they’ve worked together to get it, a new study finds.
Adult chimpanzees, on the other hand, show no affinity for meting out fair shares after cooperative projects, say psychologist Katharina Hamann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and her colleagues.
A tendency to share and share alike evolved in ancient human foraging groups organized around collaborative food gathering, the researchers propose online July 20 in Nature.