November 21, 2024
3 read me
Chimps share knowledge like humans do, driving innovation
Female chimpanzees migrating to new social groups bring with them skills and technology that help drive the development of increasingly complex toolkits.
Western chimpanzee female 54-year-old “Fana” shows her 3-year-old grandson “Flanle” how to crack palm oil nuts in Bossou Forest, Mont Nimba, Guinea.
Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo
Chimpanzees live in highly hierarchical social communities whose male members remain in the same group over time. To avoid inbreeding, females migrate to new communities upon reaching adulthood. They bring not only new genes but also new knowledge.
As this process repeated itself over thousands of years, the female chimpanzees became extremely important encouraging cultural innovationsays a new study. Women spread behaviors across communities, and these behaviors recombined with existing traditions to create layers of innovation that included increasingly complex and advanced tool sets.
The new study shows that humans are not the only species capable of making innovations more effective over time, says Cassandra Gunasekaram, PhD in evolutionary biology at the University of Zurich and lead author of the study. science. In addition, he says, the research demonstrates “the importance of social connections between different chimpanzee populations in driving cultural complexity.”
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As recently as the 1990s, the idea that non-human animals could have distinct, socially learned behaviors that constitute culture was controversial. Many examples of animal culture are known today, including diversity bird song dialects, whale voices and honey”shake dance” moves.
The new chimpanzee paper shows one example accumulated culturehowever, that is different. Accumulated culture refers to the knowledge that is transmitted from generation to generation, allowing the development of new technologies that are increasingly sophisticated, as a result of the gradual accumulation of new ideas and advances, supported by multiple intelligences. The products of accumulated culture are often so complex that it would be almost impossible for a single individual to invent them. Computers are one example: they have gained in complexity and efficiency as researchers have replicated and built upon what was already there, something that no one could create completely from scratch by today’s standards.
Accumulated culture is still considered primarily a characteristic of human society. Some researchers have started challenge that assumptionhowever, and this latest study supports that cumulative culture can be found in other species. Like humans, chimpanzees seem to have the ability to exchange and combine ideas, says lead study author Andrea Migliano, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich. He added, however, that the amount of cultural knowledge animals can accumulate is limited by their hierarchical social structure, limited migration between groups, and lack of spoken language.
For the new study, Migliano, Gunasekaram and their colleagues turned to a pre-existing open data set. Pan African Programchimpanzee research consortium. They used genetic data from 240 individual chimpanzees from 35 different communities, representing four subspecies, to analyze past encounters between the animals. First, the researchers reconstructed a 5,000-year-old ancestor by analyzing segments of DNA that represented common relatives and had broken into smaller pieces over generations. Population connections were then traced back 15,000 years by following genetic variations that occurred in individual groups but were rare in others.
In addition to genetic analyses, they also mapped 15 foraging behaviors among chimpanzee populations. They divided the behaviors into three categories: the simplest behaviors had no tools; intermediate examples were based on a single instrument; and the most complex depended on a sophisticated set of tools. An example of a complex tool set was a multi-step approach to accessing hives inside trees, using different tools to open a hive, enter the inner chamber, and extract honey-collecting loot.
Finally, the researchers superimposed and compared these networks of data obtained—genetic relativity and cultural similarity—to see if one predicted the other, giving possible confirmation of cumulative culture. When simpler behaviors were included, they found no evidence of genetic exchange between groups. When only the most complex behaviors were analyzed, however, they found a clear relationship with women’s migrations. This suggests that women moving into a new group play a role in driving innovation and that social transmission between groups is necessary to develop only the most sophisticated tools, not the simplest, says Migliano. “The big pattern we’re seeing is that if it’s complex, it’s really related to migration and it’s unlikely to be reinvented,” he added.
“This project provides the best evidence yet that wild chimpanzee traditions are truly cultural and can and have evolved cumulatively,” says Thomas Morgan, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the work. “In recent decades there has been an idea that cumulative cultural change is the secret of our species, but recent work, including this project, is really changing that view.”
