Chimpanzee culture is more like human culture than is assumed, according to new research.
Chimpanzees don’t know what to do when they encounter nuts and pebbles. Now, researchers have used experiments with boxes to show that chimpanzees not only invent the nutcracker with tools, but also have to receive information about such complex cultural behaviors from others.
Human beings have a complex culture that allows them to copy the behaviors of others. As such, human culture is cumulative, as skills and technologies accumulate over generations and are increasingly effective or complex.
According to speculation of the latent response zone in anthropology, chimpanzees are not informed in this way, but they can reinvent cultural behaviors.
Kathelijne Koops, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Zurich, has just conducted new experiments with boxes in Guinea’s Nimba Mountains to show that this may not be the case.
The primatologist tried to figure out if wild chimpanzees can invent complex habits like the nutcracker independently.
The chimpanzees were presented with a series of 4 experiments. First, the chimpanzees were given nuts and oil palm seeds. The studies then added a palm fruit to the experimental setup. In the third experiment, the nuts were opened and placed on the stones. And finally, chimpanzees were given species of nuts less difficult to break (Coula) with stones.
The chimpanzees visited the nutcracker experiments and explored the nuts and stones, but they didn’t break any nuts even after more than a year of exposure to the materials. A total of 35 teams (or subequips) of chimpanzees visited the experiments, 11 of which studied the experimental elements up close. Chimpanzees were more likely to read reports of visits on larger teams. Only one female chimpanzee observed eating palm fruit, but at no time did the chimpanzees break or eat oil palm or Coula nuts.
“Our effects recommend that chimpanzees acquire cultural habits closer to humans and not just invent complex habit equipment like the nutcracker on their own,” Koops says.
“Our discoveries about wild chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, shed light on what makes human culture unique (and it isn’t!). since the cumulative crop would possibly have an evolutionary origin shared with chimpanzees.
The studies appear in Nature Human Behaviour.
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