Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees
Abstract
Social learning in non-human primates has been studied experimentally for over 120 years, yet until the present century this was limited to what one individual learns from a single other. Evidence of group-wide traditions in the wild then highlighted the collective context for social learning, and broader ‘diffusion experiments’ have since demonstrated transmission at the community level. In the present article, we describe and set in comparative perspective three strands of our recent research that further explore the collective dimensions of culture and cumulative culture in chimpanzees. First, exposing small communities of chimpanzees to contexts incorporating increasingly challenging, but more rewarding tool use opportunities revealed solutions arising through the combination of different individuals' discoveries, spreading to become shared innovations. The second series of experiments yielded evidence of conformist changes from habitual techniques to alternatives displayed by a unanimous majority of others but implicating a form of quorum decision-making. Third, we found that between-group differences in social tolerance were associated with differential success in developing more complex tool use to exploit an increasingly inaccessible resource. We discuss the implications of this array of findings in the wider context of related studies of humans, other primates and non-primate species.
Citation
Whiten , A , Harrison , R A , McGuigan , N , Vale , G L & Watson , S K 2022 , ' Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees ' , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , vol. 377 , no. 1843 , 20200321 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0321
Publication
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0962-8436Type
Journal item
Description
Funding: The core research projects reviewed were supported by grant no. ID40128 from the John Templeton Foundation, USA, to A.W. and K. Laland. S.K.W. was supported by NCCR Evolving Language, Swiss National Science Foundation agreement no. 51NF40_180888.Collections
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