children/altruism

This comes from my textbook, Creative Activities for Young Children, ninth edition, by Mary Mayesky.  When I read it, I was just blown away.  Awesome!

"According to a Yiddish proverb, "If you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm."  A study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, offers another place to find a helping hand-- children and chimpanzees.  Researchers developed several scenarios in which an adult was struggling with a problem and needed help.  In one such scenario, an adult accidentally dropped objects on a floor and was unable to reach them.
Felix Warneken and Mike Tomasello found that children as young as 18 months willingly and spontaneously helped complete strangers in several tasks.  "The results were astonishing because these children are so young-- they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language," says Warneken.  "But they already show helping behavior."
Going to some effort to help someone, without any benefit to yourself, is called altruism.  So far, only humans are proven altruists, but never before has this ability been shown in children so young who have not yet developed much in the way of language skills.  The study shows that even infants without much socialization are willing and able to help spontaneously.
But is altruism unique to humans?  Warneken also conducted the same helping tasks with human-raised chimpanzees.  Although the chimpanzees did not help with more complex tasks, they did help when their human caretaker was reaching for something.  These new findings show that rudimentary form of altruistic behaviors are present in our closest evolutionary relatives.  "This is the first experiment showing altruistic helping toward goals in any nonhuman primate," says Warneken.  "It has been claimed chimpanzees act mainly for their own ends, but in our experiment, there was no reward and they still helped" (Max Planck Society, 2006)."
HOW COOL IS THAT???