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.This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.
Highlights
The study of animal culture has an approximately seven-decade history, encompassing a growing catalogue of vertebrate and invertebrate families, as well as a diversity of behavioural domains [1]
We have described findings from three of our recent research projects that cast light on the core topics of this journal issue: collective knowledge, culture and cumulative culture
The first, concerning collective innovation, was a chance occurrence in one of three control groups, rather than an experimental/control contrast the study was designed to focus on, but this perhaps underlines that the innovations that are key to both culture and cumulative culture may be rare occurrences that researchers are lucky to be able to document
Summary
The study of animal culture has an approximately seven-decade history, encompassing a growing catalogue of vertebrate and invertebrate families, as well as a diversity of behavioural domains [1]. In a ‘high level only’ condition, we provisioned a group of five chimpanzees with the circumstances of phase 3 from the start (the juice container was covered, requiring LBT use) This group lacked the opportunity over their 30 total hours of exposure to build their skills cumulatively, beginning with techniques such as sponging and probing with sticks and other materials, and sucking through simple straws. Three individuals in the groups managed to succeed by creating and using an elongated tool at level 3, only one other chimpanzee witnessing this achieved a similar task success; the discovery did not spread in the group, to become a shared innovation This result is consistent with the findings of the earlier CCE experiments reviewed above [43,45] in which chimpanzees did not acquire a more complex and rewarding technique than they had already learned and habitually used, such as dipping for honey in the 2008 study [43]. The collective and cumulative effects we recorded in the juice experiment occurred only in the ‘ecological challenge’ context, when the lower level solutions were no longer available
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