Despite being one of the most cooperative species on the planet, humans routinely fail to manage shared resources sustainably. We overfish from the oceans, burn fossil fuels, and over-prescribe antibiotics; behaviours that offer individualistic short-term benefits, but result in long-term collective negative outcomes. Studying our closest living relatives, the non-human great apes, can help us understand how human cooperation has evolved, and under which conditions cooperative sustainability tends to succeed and fail. In a new study, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, address this issue by presenting chimpanzees with a controlled 'resource dilemma' that reflects the conflict between personal gain and collective sustainability.