Put your money where your mouth is (Image: Dan Barba/Alamy)
HAGGLERS take note: it doesn’t take sophisticated dialogue to strike a deal. Tests show chimps can negotiate a fair share of food without so much as gesturing.
Alicia Melis of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues presented six pairings of dominant and subordinate chimps with a deal-brokering task.
They released each pair of animals into two connecting rooms, each containing two plates of bananas resting on a tray. In one room there was half a banana on each plate; in the other room one…
