Chapter 15 - Tools for the Trees: Orangutan Arboreal Tool Use and Creativity

Abstract

This chapter assesses the nature and role of creativity in orangutans’ tool use for arboreal travel and positioning. Tools have been a major focus of research because of their implications for cognition and innovation. Orangutans have contributed relatively little to this topic because, until recently, they showed little tool use in the wild. Their tool use is worth reconsidering because recent revisions to the “tool” definition, especially lifting the requirement that tool objects be unattached, mean that some of their manipulations of the forest canopy now quality as tool use. Such tool use may offer new insights into creativity because the forest canopy is highly unstable and unpredictable, so orangutans’ arboreal tool use favors improvisation and innovation. We undertook an exploratory study of creativity in orangutans’ tool use during arboreal travel and positioning (per the revised tool definition). We compiled all available reports of such tool use, classified them into distinct types (the tool-target relationship manipulated), and assessed them for evidence of improvisation and innovation. We identified 42 different types of these tools in native habitat; tentatively, 19 suggested innovation and 7 improvisation. Original event reports also suggested the processes that contributed to innovative and improvised tool use: they include deliberately recruiting accidental occurrences, recreating (to the degree possible) naturally occurring structures or configurations, substituting alternative for original tool objects, and combining multiple objects to solve one problem. Findings are tentative, given the exploratory nature of this study, but consistent with experts’ impressions that orangutans’ tool use in arboreal travel and positioning is relatively common and that creativity relatively often contributes. They certainly encourage follow-up systematic studies.