Great apes use touch to build trust before conflict, study finds

When chimpanzees and bonobos sense conflict coming—a scramble over food, a moment of tension—they do something that might look familiar to anyone who has ever stood in a huddle before something difficult. They move closer. They touch. They embrace. Sometimes they place their fingers in each other's mouths. And then they proceed into whatever stressful moment awaits.

Researchers at Durham University have been watching this unfold, and what they've observed suggests that the gesture we make before we face something hard—the hug, the hand on the shoulder, the gathering close—may be far older than we are. It may be millions of years old.

The study focused on chimpanzees and bonobos living in sanctuaries in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. The scientists designed experiments that mimicked natural feeding conditions in the wild, using peanuts as the draw. The setup was simple: create a situation where competition would naturally arise, then observe how the animals prepared themselves for it. What emerged from the data was striking. Before the tension, before the conflict over resources, the apes came together. They reassured one another through physical contact. They touched, they held, they connected.

This was particularly surprising in chimpanzees, animals often characterized by their capacity for aggression. Yet here they were, engaging in close physical contact as a way to steel themselves for what was coming. Professor Zanna Clay, one of the researchers, described it as "a rallying cry"—the kind of thing a football team does in the moments before they take the field. "It's like a 'we' rather than a 'me'," she explained. The behavior serves a function: it transforms individual anxiety into collective readiness. It says, we are in this together.

Dr. Jake Brooker, another researcher on the project, noted that social touch is among the oldest forms of communication available to primates—older than language, older than words. By comparing bonobos and chimpanzees, our two closest living relatives, the scientists can trace the evolutionary pathway of how we manage tension, how we cooperate, how we build trust when stakes are high. The behavior they observed likely stretches back at least seven million years, to the point before humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos diverged from a common ancestor.

Which means that when a human athlete puts an arm around a teammate before a crucial moment, or when a group gathers close and places hands together before something difficult, that person is drawing on a social toolkit that predates language, that predates civilization, that is woven into the deepest parts of what we are. The research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggests that some of our most fundamental ways of managing fear and building solidarity are not learned behaviors at all—they are echoes of something ancient, something we share with the animals closest to us on the tree of life.