Primates Show Pet-Keeping Behavior, Suggesting Deep Evolutionary Roots

Across the animal kingdom, the line between human uniqueness and shared inheritance continues to blur. New research documenting primates — chimpanzees, monkeys, and others — caring tenderly for animals of entirely different species suggests that the impulse to keep pets is not a civilizational invention but an evolutionary endowment, one written into the primate genome long before the first human built a hearth or named a dog. If our closest relatives spontaneously nurture creatures they might otherwise hunt, then what we call 'pet-keeping' may be less a cultural choice than a biological homec