Chapter 2, Tomasello

While reading through chapter 2, I was struck with a thought of a test that could be done to test a chimp's ability to understand working together for a greater goal. We've all seen studies that show chimps with three boxes and a banana high in the air, suspended from a wire, but this test doesn't cause the chimp to have to work with another in concert in order to get what they want. If they were able to set one up so that the banana would be dropped only if one chimp stood in one place and the other used the pressure trigger of the first to open the gate, it might let us see what their interaction would then be. Would the first chimp be jipped out of the reward because he was standing on the pressure sensor needed to release the food, or would the other chimp share as an acknowledgment of the contribution by the other helper? My hunch is that the second one would not realize the work done by the first, which is something humans must do to prevent infighting among the species.
In going through the writing by Tomasello, it's interesting to realize all the important little things that we as humans can do that seem so simple at our cognitive level, but were crucial in our species evolving the way it did. I didn't realize just how important group learning (and intentional group learning) is to our species. I suppose it's true that humans are much more likely to figure out what intentions and actions are in other humans, since that ability sets us apart from the other apes. It's interesting when the study was conduced concerning testing the chimps with no human contact versus human contact versus small children. It begs the question from my mind that if chimps had simply had one of their species somewhere along the line who had a brain defect that caused them to engage in group learning and passed those genes on, perhaps the course of human evolution would have changed dramatically. I've read elsewhere that we humans killed off all the other kinds of humans that once were on the planet, they think by either out-competing them or, quite literally, by killing them off. I hope Tomasello uses information gathered from other kinds of humans in this book as well in addition to talking about other primates.