The Social Minds of Humans and other Apes
Humans exhibit remarkable capacities for social intelligence, cognitive skills that seem to support unique forms of communication, cooperation, and culture. But how did these capacities evolve? To address this question, I will explore the social lives of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, and present a number of controlled experiments probing their cognition. These studies reveal that other apes gather a diversity of knowledge about their social worlds, and share with humans numerous capacities for tracking and predicting the behavior of their groupmates. It is therefore very likely that these rich foundations of human social intelligence were within the cognitive potential of our common ancestors, and evolved at least 6-9 million years ago.