Forget, for a moment, about the ease with which human beings use tools and the inventive ways we express ourselves through art and language. The behavior that really distinguishes humans from other primates is that we can sit quietly in a theater full of strangers — dozens or even hundreds of us — and not fight or impregnate anybody by the end of the show.
“If you put a hundred strange chimpanzees in a room, there would be bloodshed,” says Steven Churchill, a paleoanthropologist at Duke University.
