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Cumulative culture in nonhumans : overlooked findings from Japanese monkeys?

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McGrew_2017_Primates_Japanesemonkeys_CC.pdf (1.122Mb)
Date
03/2018
Author
Schofield, Daniel P.
McGrew, William C.
Takahashi, Akiko
Hirata, Satoshi
Keywords
Cumulative culture
Ethnography
Food processing
Japanese macaque
Traditions
QL Zoology
BF Psychology
Animal Science and Zoology
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Abstract
Cumulative culture, generally known as the increasing complexity or efficiency of cultural behaviors additively transmitted over successive generations, has been emphasized as a hallmark of human evolution. Recently, reviews of candidates for cumulative culture in nonhuman species have claimed that only humans have cumulative culture. Here, we aim to scrutinize this claim, using current criteria for cumulative culture to re-evaluate overlooked qualitative but longitudinal data from a nonhuman primate, the Japanese monkey (Macaca fuscata). We review over 60 years of Japanese ethnography of Koshima monkeys, which indicate that food-washing behaviors (e.g., of sweet potato tubers and wheat grains) seem to have increased in complexity and efficiency over time. Our reassessment of the Koshima ethnography is preliminary and nonquantitative, but it raises the possibility that cumulative culture, at least in a simple form, occurs spontaneously and adaptively in other primates and nonhumans in nature.
Citation
Schofield , D P , McGrew , W C , Takahashi , A & Hirata , S 2018 , ' Cumulative culture in nonhumans : overlooked findings from Japanese monkeys? ' , Primates , vol. 59 , no. 2 , pp. 113-122 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-017-0642-7
Publication
Primates
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-017-0642-7
ISSN
0032-8332
Type
Journal item
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
The authors thank Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) for funding DS’s visit to Koshima and Prof. Tetsuro Matsuzawa for funding WCM’s visit to Koshima.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/12463

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