The reluctant innovator: orangutans and the phylogeny of creativity

Abstract

One contribution of 15 to a theme issue 'Innovation in animals and humans: understanding the origins and development of novel and creative behaviour'. Young orangutans are highly neophobic, avoid independent exploration and show a preference for social learning. Accordingly, they acquire virtually all their learned skills through exploration that is socially induced. Adult exploration rates are also low. Comparisons strongly suggest that major innovations, i.e. behaviours that have originally been brought into the population through individual invention, are made where ecological opportunities to do so are propitious. Most populations nonetheless have large innovation repertoires, because innovations, once made, are retained well through social transmission. Wild orangutans are therefore not innovative. In striking contrast, zoo-living orangutans actively seek novelty and are highly exploratory and innovative, probably because of positive reinforcement, active encouragement by human role models, increased sociality and an expectation of safety. The explanation for this contrast most relevant to hominin evolution is that captive apes generally have a highly reduced cognitive load, in particular owing to the absence of predation risk, which strongly reduces the costs of exploration. If the orangutan results generalize to other great apes, this suggests that our ancestors could have become more curious once they had achieved near-immunity to predation on the eve of the explosive increase in creativity characterizing the Upper Palaeolithic Revolution.

Innovativeness as an emergent property: a new alignment of comparative and experimental research on animal innovation

“…For example, manipulating food deprivation elicits a marked increase in the likelihood of innovative problem-solving [58], but classes of individuals assumed to have less access to resources do not always show higher innovativeness [57]. On the other hand, van Schaik et al [59] describe wild orangutans as neophobic, reluctant innovators, but when innovations do arise, they do so accidentally or opportunistically, not by necessity and not by curiosity. The authors go on to suggest that the 'curious' innovator is only a recent evolutionary occurrence in the pathway to hominins.…”

“…Neophilia is first and foremost an information-gathering exercise with costs and benefits. Van Schaik et al [59] suggest, as have others, that safe environments allow the evolution of neophilia by reducing its costs. However, neophilia calls upon learning and memory processes [52,72], supported by a neural machinery that is no doubt costly [73].…”

“…One would also expect maternal influences and early ontogenetic social and individual experience to contribute to setting baseline response levels and speeds of habituation to novelty. Such developmental programming of novelty responses could explain why van Schaik et al's [59] captive orangutans and many other captive primates and birds are so much more neophilic and innovative than their wild counterparts (for a review, see [77]). In other words, neophilia-driven innovation propensity is itself a plastic strategy.…”

Older, sociable capuchins (Cebus capucinus) invent more social behaviors, but younger monkeys innovate more in other contexts

“…Following the definitions of Ramsey et al (12) and van Schaik et al (13), we emphasize that innovations are not part of the innate repertoire and do not arise predictably in all population members at certain points in the life history; also, they do not predictably emerge in all population members in response to particular social or ecological conditions. The definition by Ramsey et al (12) and van Schaik et al (13) differs from the definition by Reader and Laland (11), because it focuses on the individual rather than the population [i.e., Ramsey et al (12) argue that multiple individuals within the same population could independently create the same behavior]. We take a compromise position, counting a behavior as an innovation if this is the first time that the behavior has been seen in a particular social group during the putative innovator's lifetime.…”

“…Most research on animal innovation thus far has involved either (i) analysis of anecdotes drawn from published literature on topics other than innovation (16)(17)(18) or (ii) experiments in either the field or the laboratory, in which experimenters present individuals with a novel problem to solve (8,9,(19)(20)(21)(22). The most prominent body of innovation research using observational data has focused on orangutans (Pongo) using developmental data from rehabilitants (23) or "geographic contrasts methods" akin to those used to diagnose probable social traditions (24,25) to infer innovation rates by evaluating the patterning of within-and between-group behavioral variation in short-term studies of both captive and field populations (12,13,26). Few field studies of innovation are longitudinal or look at the properties of individuals that make them more, or less, likely to innovate within their lifetime.…”