Cracking chimpanzee culture

Chimpanzees do not automatically know what to do when they come across nuts or stones. Researchers at the University of Zurich have used field experiments to show that chimpanzees need to not only crack nuts with tools, but also learn such complex cultural behaviors from others. Therefore, their culture is often more like human culture than expected.

Humans are complicated culture It allows them to copy actions from others. like that, Human culture Skills and technologies are cumulative as they accumulate over generations and become increasingly efficient or complex. According to the zone of potential solution hypotheses in anthropology, chimpanzees do not learn this way, but they can reinvent cultural behaviors individually.Kathelijne Koops, Professor UZH of the Faculty of Anthropology, wrote the novel Field experiment In the Nimba Mountains of Guinea, this may not be the case.

Four experiments with wild chimpanzees

Primatologists have investigated whether wild chimpanzees can actually independently invent complex behaviors such as nut cracking. A series of four experiments were conducted on chimpanzees. First, I gave the chimpanzee oil palm nuts and stones. Next, the study added palm nuts to the experimental setup. In the third experiment, the nuts were cracked open and placed on a stone. And finally, the chimpanzee was presented with another kind of fragile nut (Coula), along with the stone.

Chimpanzees visited nut cracking experiments and searched for nuts and stones, but did not crack the nuts even after being exposed to the material for over a year. A total of 35 chimpanzee parties (or subgroups) visited the experiment, 11 of which scrutinized the experiment items. Chimpanzees were more likely to explore the experiment when visiting a larger party. Only one female chimpanzee was eating palm nuts, but the chimpanzee did not crack or eat oil palm or coola nuts.

The origin of the shared evolution of cumulative culture

“Our findings suggest that chimpanzees have acquired human-like cultural behavior and have not merely invented the use of complex tools. Action It’s like nuts crack naturally, “says Coups. The existence of the model to learn seems to be a missing part. Wild chimpanzee, Our closest living relatives help shed light on what (and not) makes human culture unique. Specifically, they suggest that the continuity between chimpanzees and human cultural evolution is greater than normally expected. Human ability May have a shared evolutionary origin for a cumulative culture Chimpanzee.. “

The study is published at Natural human behavior..