New Insights into Chimpanzees, Tools, and Termites from the Congo Basin

Sanz,; Morgan, Hiram; Gulick,

doi:10.2307/3473169

Cited by 64 publications

(102 citation statements)

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“…Recent experimental evidence indicates a conformity bias that has the potential to strengthen the effect of the culturally shaped niche to which each developing individual is exposed . Among both human and nonhuman societies, such culturally constructed niches may be instantiated not only materially, as in the case of accumulations of useful tools at chimpanzee termiting sites (Sanz et al 2004), but in social conventions. For example, Perry et al (2003a;2003b) have described several types of intimate social interactions and games, including bizarre actions like resting one's fingers deep in companions' mouths and noses, that have the hallmarks of local conventions among different communities of wild capuchin monkeys.…”

Section: R22 Further Parallels With Evolutionary Biologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

2006

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We suggest that human culture exhibits key Darwinian evolutionary properties, and argue that the structure of a science of cultural evolution should share fundamental features with the structure of the science of biological evolution. This latter claim is tested by outlining the methods and approaches employed by the principal subdisciplines of evolutionary biology and assessing whether there is an existing or potential corresponding approach to the study of cultural evolution. Existing approaches within anthropology and archaeology demonstrate a good match with the macroevolutionary methods of systematics, paleobiology, and biogeography, whereas mathematical models derived from population genetics have been successfully developed to study cultural microevolution. Much potential exists for experimental simulations and field studies of cultural microevolution, where there are opportunities to borrow further methods and hypotheses from biology. Potential also exists for the cultural equivalent of molecular genetics in "social cognitive neuroscience," although many fundamental issues have yet to be resolved. It is argued that studying culture within a unifying evolutionary framework has the potential to integrate a number of separate disciplines within the social sciences.

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Section: R22 Further Parallels With Evolutionary Biologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

2006

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“…Recently, Sanz et al (13) sought to refute the notion that the behaviors cannot be considered cultural because they do not show signs of the ratchet effect. They suggested that certain behavioral patterns shown by some populations of wild chimpanzees have become more elaborate through time (e.g., termite-fishing strategies).…”

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confidence: 99%

Phylogenetic analyses of behavior support existence of culture among wild chimpanzees

Lycett

Collard

McGrew

2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Culture has long been considered to be not only unique to humans, but also responsible for making us qualitatively different from all other forms of life. In recent years, however, researchers studying chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have challenged this idea. Natural populations of chimpanzees have been found to vary greatly in their behavior. Because many of these interpopulation differences cannot be readily explained by ecological factors, it has been argued that they result from social learning and, therefore, can be regarded as cultural variations. Recent studies showing social transmission in captive chimpanzee populations suggest that this hypothesis is plausible. However, the culture hypothesis has been questioned on the grounds that the behavioral variation may be explained at a proximate level by genetic differences between subspecies. Here we use cladistic analyses of the major cross-site behavioral data set to test the hypothesis that the behavioral differences among the best-documented chimpanzee populations are genetically determined. If behavioral diversity is primarily the product of genetic differences between subspecies, then population data should show less phylogenetic structure when data from a single subspecies (P. t. schweinfurthii) are compared with data from two subspecies (P. t. verus and P. t. schweinfurthii) analyzed together. Our findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that the observed behavioral patterns of wild chimpanzee populations can be explained primarily by genetic differences between subspecies. Instead, our results support the suggestion that the behavioral patterns are the product of social learning and, therefore, can be considered cultural.social learning ͉ cultural transmission ͉ Pan troglodytes ͉ cladistics

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“…The chimpanzees never arrived at the site of a subterranean nest without bringing such a stick with them, unless one had previously been left at the site. And this was true even though the nearest appropriate tree was tens of meters away in the forest, from which point the nest site could not be seen (59). Such behavior in humans would involve imagination of the target together with mental rehearsal of the actions needed to acquire it, which would both remind and motivate one to deviate from one's path to find an appropriate species of tree.…”

Section: Inability Tomentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of working memory

Carruthers

2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Working memory (WM) is fundamental to many aspects of human life, including learning, speech and text comprehension, prospection and future planning, and explicit "system 2" forms of reasoning, as well as overlapping heavily with fluid general intelligence. WM has been intensively studied for many decades, and there is a growing consensus about its nature, its components, and its signature limits. Remarkably, given its central importance in human life, there has been very little comparative investigation of WM abilities across species. Consequently, much remains unknown about the evolution of this important human capacity. Some questions can be tentatively answered from the existing comparative literature. Even studies that were not intended to do so can nonetheless shed light on the WM capacities of nonhuman animals. However, many questions remain.T he nature of human working memory (WM) has been extensively investigated, with thousands of articles and books on the topic produced over the last half-century. Some of the main findings of this research will be outlined shortly. However, we know hardly anything about how WM evolved. For that (if we are to go beyond plausible speculation), we need detailed comparative studies. However, remarkably few such studies have been conducted, as we will see. Nevertheless, the emerging consensus about the nature of human WM allows us to frame a series of questions or alternative hypotheses concerning the possible differences between human and animal WM. Some of these can be answered, at least tentatively, from the results of existing work. However, they should also be used to frame and guide future comparative experiments. Working Memory in HumansWM is the domain-general subsystem of the mind that enables one to activate and sustain (sometimes via active rehearsal) a set of mental representations for further manipulation and processing. The contents of working memory are generally thought to be conscious. Indeed, many identify the two constructs, maintaining that representations become conscious by gaining entry into WM (1). WM is generally thought to consist of an executive component that is distributed in areas of the frontal lobes working together with sensory cortical regions in any of the various sense modalities, which interact through attentional processes (2). It is also widely accepted that WM is quite limited in span, restricted to three or four chunks of information at any one time (3). Moreover, there are significant and stable individual differences in WM abilities between people, and these have been found to predict comparative performance in many other cognitive domains (4). Indeed, they account for most (if not all) of the variance in fluid general intelligence, or g (5).The primary mechanism of WM is thought to be executively controlled attention (2, 6). It is by targeting attention at representations in sensory areas that the latter gain entry into WM, and in the same manner they can be maintained there through sustained attention. Attention itself is though...

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New Insights into Chimpanzees, Tools, and Termites from the Congo Basin

Cited by 64 publications

References 0 publications

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

Towards a unified science of cultural evolution

Phylogenetic analyses of behavior support existence of culture among wild chimpanzees

Evolution of working memory

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