EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Field experiments find no evidence that chimpanzee nut cracking can be independently innovated

Kathelijne Koops (), Aly Gaspard Soumah, Kelly L. Leeuwen, Henry Didier Camara and Tetsuro Matsuzawa
Additional contact information
Kathelijne Koops: University of Zurich
Aly Gaspard Soumah: Institut de Recherche Environnementale de Bossou
Kelly L. Leeuwen: Utrecht University
Henry Didier Camara: Institut de Recherche Environnementale de Bossou
Tetsuro Matsuzawa: Chubu Gakuin University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, vol. 6, issue 4, 487-494

Abstract: Abstract Cumulative culture has been claimed a hallmark of human evolution. Yet, the uniqueness of human culture is heavily debated. The zone of latent solutions hypothesis states that only humans have cultural forms that require form-copying social learning and are culture-dependent. Non-human ape cultural behaviours are considered ‘latent solutions’, which can be independently (re-)innovated. Others claim that chimpanzees, like humans, have cumulative culture. Here, we use field experiments at Seringbara (Nimba Mountains, Guinea) to test whether chimpanzee nut cracking can be individually (re-)innovated. We provided: (1) palm nuts and stones, (2) palm fruit bunch, (3) cracked palm nuts and (4) Coula nuts and stones. Chimpanzee parties visited (n = 35) and explored (n = 11) the experiments but no nut cracking occurred. In these experiments, chimpanzees did not individually (re-)innovate nut cracking under ecologically valid conditions. Our null results are consistent with the hypothesis that chimpanzee nut cracking is a product of social learning.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01272-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1038_s41562-021-01272-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01272-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1038_s41562-021-01272-9