The bonobo Kanzi was taught to make and use simple stone tools of the Oldowan culture. What can we conclude about the mental abilities of Homo habilis from Kanzi’s performance?
Video questions – Kanzi making and using stone tools Read More »
A reading text about tool use and tool making in the animal kingdom and in our early ancestors
Reading text: Tool making and human evolution Read More »
A cooperation game that simulates the challenge of our stone age ancestors to acquire food in the African savanna
Stone Age Hunting Game Read More »
A worksheet in which students calculate and graph the changes in the frequencies of traits related to cooperative foraging in a population over several generations, exploring the role of variation, fitness consequences and trait inheritance in evolutionary change.
Worksheet: Natural selection of traits for cooperative foraging Read More »
A fill in the blanks activity on the natural selection of traits that enabled cooperative foraging in our ancestors
Fill in the blanks: adaptations to cooperative foraging Read More »
A reading text about cooperative foraging in the animal kingdom and in our early ancestors
Reading text: Cooperative foraging Read More »
A series of experiments with small children and chimpanzees to investigate their ability and motivation to engage in collaborative activities
Cooperative activities with children and chimpanzees Read More »
In this short video, we observe how chimpanzees seem to be unable to spontaneously coordinate their activities to get food – something that humans find very easy.
Video – Can chimpanzees coordinate their activities Read More »
In a series of experiments, anthropologists wanted to find out whether chimpanzees and bonobos work together and share a common source of food. Results tell us something about the role of social tolerance in cooperative foraging.
Worksheets: Cooperation experiments with chimps and bonobos Read More »
All causal maps on human evolution in one Google slide file
Causal maps on the evolution of human traits Read More »
OpenEvo is an educational innovation project from the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
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