The spread of a novel behavior in wild chimpanzees: New insights into the ape cultural mind

Abstract

For years, the animal culture debate has been dominated by the puzzling absence of direct evidence for social transmission of behavioral innovations in the flagship species of animal culture, the common chimpanzee. Although social learning of novel behaviors has been documented in captivity, critics argue that these findings lack ecological validity and therefore may not be relevant for understanding the evolution of culture. For the wild, it is possible that group-specific behavioral differences emerge because group members respond individually to unspecified environmental differences, rather than learning from each other. In a recent paper, we used social network analyses in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) to provide direct evidence for social transmission of a behavioral innovation, moss-sponging, to extract water from a tree hole. Here, we discuss the implications of our findings and how our new methodological approach could help future studies of social learning and culture in wild apes.

Keywords:

• chimpanzee culture
• evolution of culture
• mental representations
• Pan troglodytes
• social network
• tool use

Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Funding

The fieldwork of CH was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Lucie Burgers Stichting, and the British Academy. TP was funded by the Canadian Research Chair in Continental Ecosystem Ecology, and received computational support from the Theoretical Ecosystem Ecology group at UQAR. The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Program (Marie Curie Actions) and from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) REA grant agreement n° 329197 awarded to TG, ERC grant agreement n° 283871 awarded to KZ. WH was funded by a BBSRC grant (BB/I007997/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.