Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes' tool-use behaviours.

E Reindl,C Tennie,I A Apperly,S R Beck

doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.2402

Abstract

The variety and complexity of human-made tools are unique in the animal kingdom. Research investigating why human tool use is special has focused on the role of social learning: while non-human great apes acquire tool-use behaviours mostly by individual (re-)inventions, modern humans use imitation and teaching to accumulate innovations over time. However, little is known about tool-use behaviours that humans can invent individually, i.e. without cultural knowledge. We presented 2- to 3.5-year-old children with 12 problem-solving tasks based on tool-use behaviours shown by great apes. Spontaneous tool use was observed in 11 tasks. Additionally, tasks which occurred more frequently in wild great apes were also solved more frequently by human children. Our results demonstrate great similarity in the spontaneous tool-use abilities of human children and great apes, indicating that the physical cognition underlying tool use shows large overlaps across the great ape species. This suggests that humans are neither born with special physical cognition skills, nor that these skills have degraded due to our species’ long reliance of social learning in the tool-use domain.

Highlights

The ability to use tools, i.e. to employ ‘unattached or manipulable attached environmental object[s]’ [1, p. 5], is not restricted to humans
Our study found that the majority of the investigated wild great ape tool-use behaviours are individually re-inventable by human children and that there is a close relationship between the difficulty level of these behaviours and individual discovery rates for both humans and great apes
Children showed spontaneous tool use in the majority of our tasks, suggesting that most of the studied behaviours lie within the realm of what humans can invent without observing the solution or having it demonstrated

Summary

Introduction

The ability to use tools, i.e. to employ ‘unattached or manipulable attached environmental object[s]’ [1, p. 5], is not restricted to humans. Exploring the reasons for this uniqueness, researchers have focused on the role of special types of social transmission [4,5,6,7,8]: as Vygotsky [9] argued, humans’ capacity to imitate and teach others enabled them to acquire behaviours that they could not (yet) have invented on their own. Over historical time, this ability allowed humans to gradually accumulate design improvements in tools [4,6]. What are the roots of our tool cultures—both phylogenetically and ontogenetically?

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Results

Conclusion