When given a choice between cooperating or competing, chimpanzees choose to cooperate five times more frequently, researchers have found. This challenges the perceptions humans are unique in our ability to cooperate and chimpanzees are overly competitive, and suggests the roots of human cooperation are shared with other primates. To determine if chimpanzees possess the same ability humans have to overcome competition, the researchers set up a cooperative task that closely mimicked chimpanzee natural conditions, for example, providing the 11 great apes that voluntarily participated in this study with an open choice to select cooperation partners and giving them plenty of ways to compete. Working beside the chimpanzees’ grassy outdoor enclosure at the Yerkes Research Center Field Station, the researchers gave the great apes thousands of opportunities to pull cooperatively at an apparatus filled with rewards. In half of the test sessions, two chimpanzees needed to participate to succeed, and in the other half, three chimpanzees were needed. While the set up provided ample opportunities for competition, aggression and freeloading, the chimpanzees overwhelmingly performed cooperative acts – 3,565 times across 94 hour-long test sessions. http://www.yerkes.emory.edu/about/n...nce/de_Waal_and_Suchak_Chimp_Cooperation.html Well, I guess this works with chimpanzees from the same tribe? Cooperation with another tribe seems unlikely.
Are you referring to the larger (and better known) chimpanzee species, Pan troglodytes, or the much smaller bonobo, Pan paniscus? Other than size, the major difference between the two closely-related species is that the bonobos have a matriarchal society, whereas the larger chimps are patriarchal. This shows up readily in any examination of their social patterns. The larger chimps are quite violent, often lying in wait to kill strangers from another tribe. The bonobos, on the other hand, live in peace and have sex orgies every few days, in which the entire tribe participates, even the elders and the children. Before anyone realized that there were two species, zoos commonly put bonobos and the larger chimps together. This was a horrible situation for the bonobos, who were too small to fight back against their violent cousins. Naturally, the larger chimps made a practice of raping the smaller females, so today the chimpanzees in many zoos are hybrids that tell us nothing at all about the way their wild relatives live in Africa.
Source article doesn't say, but my guess is Pan troglodytes, because in most cases researchers refer bonobo as bonobo. Edit: Found the paper (published 2 days ago). It is Pan troglodytes. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/08/16/1611826113.abstract
