Abstract
Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in order to better evaluate our closest relatives' cultural capacities. Previous studies using transmission chain experimental paradigms, in which the behavioural output of one individual becomes the target behaviour for the next individual in the chain, show that cultural transmission can lead to the progressive emergence of systematically structured behaviours in humans. Inspired by this work, we combined a pattern reproduction task on touch screens with an iterated learning procedure to develop transmission chains of baboons (Papio papio). Using this procedure, we show that baboons can exhibit three fundamental aspects of human cultural evolution: a progressive increase in performance, the emergence of systematic structure and the presence of lineage specificity. Our results shed new light on human uniqueness: we share with our closest relatives essential capacities to produce human-like cultural evolution.
Highlights
Culture is often seen as the pinnacle of human evolution [1,2,3,4,5]: it provides the complex social structures, technologies and languages that have allowed our species to spread across the planet
Participants might be asked to learn and subsequently reproduce a miniature language: the first participant in a chain attempts to memorize a language comprising random associations of pictures and labels, with subsequent participants asked to learn and reproduce the language provided during recall by the previous participant in the chain [10]. This iterated learning procedure leads to three fundamental properties of human cumulative culture: (i) a progressive increase in performance; (ii) the emergence of systematic structure and (iii) lineage specificity, with different kinds of structure emerging in different chains [11]
Our experimental paradigm allows us to show that, with the right scaffolding, baboons are capable of sustaining a culture in the laboratory that exhibits some of the fundamental properties of human culture
Summary
Culture is often seen as the pinnacle of human evolution [1,2,3,4,5]: it provides the complex social structures, technologies and languages that have allowed our species to spread across the planet. Once the baboons were trained to criterion on this task, we implemented an iterated learning procedure [25] in which the behavioural output of one individual on a set of 50 grids became the target behaviour for the individual (figure 1c) in a manner similar to previous transmission chain studies. Using this procedure, we show that baboons can exhibit three fundamental aspects of human cumulative cultural evolution: a progressive increase in performance, the emergence of systematic structure and the presence of lineage specificity. We present the main results in the text and additional details in electronic supplementary material
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