Humans Are the Only Animals That Can Show True Teamwork

I see. According to that definition, teamwork is a purely human phenomenon.

Animals do not make groups by selecting members based on a specific desire or purpose. In that sense, a group of animals is not a team, it's just a "pack."

Animals behaving in packs is useful for sharing food and reproduction.

Animals must eat to stay alive, and it's safer to eat together than alone. Having more eyes makes it easier to find food and spot predators.

Exactly. Animals adapt to their environment. If living in packs is more advantageous for finding food, animals will form packs.

The same goes for reproduction. If the environment dictates that a species should have a lot of offspring, it will naturally choose to live in packs.

Ultimately, these packs are the result of evolution, selected through trial and error over a long period of time. This is fundamentally different from humans, where individuals will voluntary create groups based on a shared objective.

That phenomenon is known as conformity. It occurs when one individual behaves in reaction to danger, and another individual mimics that behavior. This extremely primitive reaction can be found in many animals.

However, conformity in humans isn't the same—it does not amount to acting the same way as another individual.

For instance, if we look at hunting, humans will target the same prey and begin acting in conformity. However, not everyone necessarily takes the same action. In that sense, human conformity amounts to taking different actions according to a shared objective.

Monkeys are known to change their behavior in one-on-one relationships based on whom they're interacting with. Monkeys distinguish between individual members of their group. Then, following complex social rules, they use their brains to determine the appropriate social behavior vis-à-vis each member.

However, humans are far more complex. We possess the imagination to position ourselves as third parties and ask ourselves which behavior we need to adopt in order to achieve a certain goal.

Absolutely. When rainforests began to recede as a result of climate change, humans were forced to move out of the woods. In the forest, there was plenty of food year-round, and when attacked by terrestrial carnivores, it was always possible to escape into the trees.

However, once you leave the rainforest, food becomes scarcer and there are fewer places to hide. As a result, it became necessary to separate those who could walk long distances to find food from those who would stay and wait somewhere safe.

Yes, and in order to divide roles, you need to share experience, tell your peers how to find food. You have to be able to imagine the entire process: set "eating together" as your objective, have someone go find food, bring it back and share it with everyone. In imagining this process, planning was born.

Teamwork begins when you have a common goal and a plan to achieve it. That became possible when humans developed imagination as a result of leaving the rainforest.

It was huge. When you look at our close relatives like orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees, they practically never left the rainforest. Because humans chose for some reason to leave the rainforest, we had to take stock of our weaknesses and come up with new strengths.

At that time, humans didn't evolve to use their bodies as weapons—for example by developing large fangs or growing bigger and stronger. Instead, they cooperated through increased empathy. I think that has a link to what we nowadays refer to as teamwork.

The ability to see and imagine the world from another person's standpoint.

For example, if you can think from other people's standpoint, when you are sent to pick grapes, you can imagine how many people are in your group and how many grapes they expect you to bring back. You could say that imagination was born through empathy, which in turn made teamwork possible.

To be precise, before there were words, there was music. Playing music was a way to send a message to a far-away companion.

Words are an efficient and portable way of taking what we feel with our five senses, making it abstract and expressing it to those around us. I believe that language brought our ability to empathize to a new level.

It was difficult for humans to overcome our fixation on where we are in the moment. Even for modern humans, actions taken by people we know will provoke much stronger emotional reactions than actions by people we don't know.

I will feel a strong sense of empathy for someone suffering in front of me, but it's much harder for me to understand the joy and suffering of someone far away. That's one of the limits to our empathy.

It depends how long they've known each other. The longer gorillas are around one another, the more they trust each other, whereas they are much less trusting of newcomers and intruders.

Humans on the other hand are able to establish a mental connection from the moment they start using words. Language is a virtual means of activating our imagination to connect with other people.

It is believed that before humans were able to speak, they shared physical connections with one another via the five senses. Of those five, vision and hearing allow us to take in more of reality than the other senses. Because of that, "seeing" and "listening" are senses that can more easily be shared.

Touch, smell and taste can't be shared 100 percent. Smell and taste are difficult to put into words, and when you touch something you can also feel yourself being touched, which makes that feeling impossible to share.

The interesting thing is, the senses that can't be shared—touch, smell and taste—are the most important senses for building trust.