# Tomasello_final **Keywords:** Apes, Culture, Cognition, Evolution, Cooperation **Abstract:** Humans share the vast majority of their cognitive skills with other great apes. In addition, however, humans have also evolved a unique suite of cognitive skills and motivations—collectively referred to as shared intentionality—for living collaboratively, learning socially, and exchanging information in cultural groups. KEY WORDS: Apes, Culture, Cognition, Evolution, Cooperation Human Cognition ..... 2 Surely one of the deepest and most important questions in all of the psychological sciences is how human cognition is similar to and different from that of other primates. The main datum is this: Humans seemingly engage in all kinds of cognitive activities that their nearest primate relatives do not, but at the same time there is great variability among different cultural groups. All groups have complex technologies but of very different types; all groups use linguistic and other symbols but in quite different ways; all groups have complex social institutions but very different ones. What this suggests is that human cognition is in some way bound up with human culture. Here we argue that this is indeed the case, and we then try to explain this fact evolutionarily. Similarities in Ape and Human Cognition The five great ape species (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, humans) share a common ancestor from about 15 million years ago, with the last three sharing a common ancestor from about 6 million years ago. Since great apes are so closely related to one another evolution