The wrong conclusion to take away from all these studies is that these rodents are humanlike. The right conclusion is that we’re animal-like.

Frans de Waal is one of the world’s leading primate behavior researchers. Since the 1970s, he’s made thousands of observations of primate communities. He’s shown that many primates will console one another after fights. He’s seen them hug and kiss. In 2010, he co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science compiling data from more than 3,000 observations of chimpanzee fights. The paper found that chimps will commonly console the losers of fights — a behavior especially pronounced among chimps with kinship bonds.

De Waal thinks it’s wrongheaded for some scientists to dismiss observations of empathy in animals. After all, it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. If human empathy is so robust and adaptive, it must have evolved from more primitive forms.

“It is hard to imagine that empathy — a characteristic so basic to the human species — came into existence only when our lineage split off from that of the apes,” says de Waal. “It must be far older than that.”

If human and animal empathy are the same, it means lessons learned from the brains of animals can be applied to heal our own.