HENRY

A forthcoming paper by Andrew Whiten and associates follows up on their previous work which identified a number cultural traits in chimpanzees. This new work introduced a number of new food extraction and tool use behaviors into experimental populations. In a number of sites, the new behaviors spread throughout the population, and even jumped between a few groups within eyesight of each other.

This is very cool - it’s more strong evidence of cultural traditions in chimpanzees, and very indicative of social learning and some form of cultural evolution.

The abstract (doi) says:

Field reports provide increasing evidence for local behavioral traditions among fish, birds, and mammals. These findings are significant for evolutionary biology because social learning affords faster adaptation than genetic change and has generated new (cultural) forms of evolution. Orangutan and chimpanzee field studies suggest that like humans, these apes are distinctive among animals in each exhibiting over 30 local traditions. However, direct evidence is lacking in apes and, with the exception of vocal dialects, in animals generally for the intergroup transmission that would allow innovations to spread widely and become evolutionarily significant phenomena.

Here, we provide robust experimental evidence that alternative foraging techniques seeded in different groups of chimpanzees spread differentially not only within groups but serially across two further groups with substantial fidelity. Combining these results with those from recent social-diffusion studies in two larger groups
offers the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman species can sustain unique local cultures, each constituted by multiple traditions. The convergence of these results with those from the wild implies a richness in chimpanzees’ capacity for culture, a richness that parsimony suggests was shared with our common ancestor.

Posted on June 8th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill