New research suggests that close physical contact among great apes serves as a prehistoric method for establishing trust. Scientists from Durham University observed that both chimpanzees and bonobos utilize hugging, kissing, and other forms of touch to offer reassurance before potential food-related conflicts.
Professor Zanna Clay compared these interactions to a team huddle in sports, noting that the behavior shifts the group dynamic from individual competition to collective cooperation. By placing peanuts in controlled environments at sanctuaries in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers discovered that groups exhibiting more frequent physical bonding were able to eat together with significantly less friction.
Dr. Jake Brooker noted that such behavior likely predates the evolution of language, pointing toward an ancient social toolkit for managing group competition. This tendency to foster unity through physical proximity may have originated seven million years ago, tracing back to the common ancestors of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. The study, which appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that human habits such as patting a colleague on the shoulder could be a refined version of these primordial social rituals.