"Peter Pan" apes don't know selfish.

• Position: Anthropology

Sharing is a behavior on which day care workers and kindergarten teachers tend to offer young humans a lot of coaching but, for our ape cousins, the bonobos, sharing just comes naturally. Chimpanzees, by contrast, are notorious for hogging food for themselves--by physical aggression, if necessary. While chimps will share as youngsters, they grow out of it.

In several experiments designed to measure food-sharing and social inhibition among bonobos and chimps living in African sanctuaries, researchers from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., say these behavioral differences may be rooted in developmental patterns that portray something about the historical lifestyles of these two closely related apes. When compared with chimps, bonobos seem to be living in "a sort of Peter Pan world," in which they never grow up--and they share, points out Ruth Moore, professor of anthropology, who thinks this kinder, gentler ape's behavior has been shaped by the relative abundance of its environment. Living south of the Congo River, where resources are more plentiful, bonobos do not compete with gorillas for food as chimps have to, and they do...