Why do chimpanzees have diverse behavioral repertoires yet lack more complex cultures? Invention and social information use in a cumulative task

Vale, Gillian L.; McGuigan, Nicola; Burdett, Emily; Lambeth, Susan P.; Lucas, Amanda; Rawlings, Bruce; Schapiro, Steven J.; Watson, Stuart K.; Whiten, Andrew

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.11.003

Cited by 24 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 97 publications

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“…The present study extends previous findings, which have questioned the crucial role of copying mechanisms ( 46 , 47 ) and/or emphasized the importance of causal understanding/inductive biases ( 48 – 50 ) and innovative skills in CTC ( 51 , 52 ). In this experiment, participants with very little or randomly transformed social information managed to improve and converge toward similar outcomes compared to participants with complete information [( 13 , 53 ) see also ( 54 , 55 )].…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations

et al. 2022

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Understanding the evolution of human technology is key to solving the mystery of our origins. Current theories propose that technology evolved through the accumulation of modifications that were mostly transmitted between individuals by blind copying and the selective retention of advantageous variations. An alternative account is that high-fidelity transmission in the context of cumulative technological culture is supported by technical reasoning, which is a reconstruction mechanism that allows individuals to converge to optimal solutions. We tested these two competing hypotheses with a microsociety experiment, in which participants had to optimize a physical system in partial- and degraded-information transmission conditions. Our results indicated an improvement of the system over generations, which was accompanied by an increased understanding of it. The solutions produced tended to progressively converge over generations. These findings show that technical reasoning can bolster high-fidelity transmission through convergent transformations, which highlights its role in the cultural evolution of technology.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 87%

Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations

et al. 2022

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“…We can summarize this in the conclusion that collective knowledge can be both an important cause and a consequence in the emergence of cumulative culture as in the human case [75]. As we noted above, this conclusion is based on a serendipitous set of observations, contrasting with many other reports of a lack of cumulative cultural change in chimpanzee social learning experiments [43,45,47]. This may imply that if instances of complex behaviour in the wild are indeed the results of cumulative culture that some propose [40–42], they may depend on processes of collective discovery and cultural transmission based on relatively rare inventive episodes that require long periods of time, multiple generations and/or large populations to generate them.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Support for the basic facilitating effect of operating as a group, highlighted at the top of figure 2 , comes from a separate, later study in which we presented chimpanzees (as well as, elsewhere, children) with opportunities to gain a range of reward levels in an environment offering opportunities for cumulative learning and culture [ 47 ]. Subjects faced a deliberately complex array of opportunities manifested in shelves differentiated by four levels, with the lowest level requiring the easiest actions to access but containing less preferred food rewards, and the highest level requiring the most challenging actions delivering the most desirable rewards.…”

Section: Collective Innovation Culture and Cumulative Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees

Whiten

Harrison

McGuigan

et al. 2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Social learning in non-human primates has been studied experimentally for over 120 years, yet until the present century this was limited to what one individual learns from a single other. Evidence of group-wide traditions in the wild then highlighted the collective context for social learning, and broader ‘diffusion experiments’ have since demonstrated transmission at the community level. In the present article, we describe and set in comparative perspective three strands of our recent research that further explore the collective dimensions of culture and cumulative culture in chimpanzees. First, exposing small communities of chimpanzees to contexts incorporating increasingly challenging, but more rewarding tool use opportunities revealed solutions arising through the combination of different individuals' discoveries, spreading to become shared innovations. The second series of experiments yielded evidence of conformist changes from habitual techniques to alternatives displayed by a unanimous majority of others but implicating a form of quorum decision-making. Third, we found that between-group differences in social tolerance were associated with differential success in developing more complex tool use to exploit an increasingly inaccessible resource. We discuss the implications of this array of findings in the wider context of related studies of humans, other primates and non-primate species. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

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“…Considerable debate exists over the underlying socio-cognitive requirements of CCE [7,[69][70][71][72][73][74]. Conflicting arguments and empirical evidence have been put forward about the role of evolved social learning mechanisms and causal reasoning in CCE [7,70,71,75].…”

Section: Harnessing Natural Phenomena Collectivelymentioning

confidence: 99%

Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena

Derex

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Cumulative cultural evolution (CCE)—defined as the process by which beneficial modifications are culturally transmitted and progressively accumulated over time—has long been argued to underlie the unparalleled diversity and complexity of human culture. In this paper, I argue that not just any kind of cultural accumulation will give rise to human-like culture. Rather, I suggest that human CCE depends on the gradual exploitation of natural phenomena, which are features of our environment that, through the laws of physics, chemistry or biology, generate reliable effects which can be exploited for a purpose. I argue that CCE comprises two distinct processes: optimizing cultural traits that exploit a given set of natural phenomena (Type I CCE) and expanding the set of natural phenomena we exploit (Type II CCE). I argue that the most critical features of human CCE, including its open-ended dynamic, stems from Type II CCE. Throughout the paper, I contrast the two processes and discuss their respective socio-cognitive requirements. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The emergence of collective knowledge and cumulative culture in animals, humans and machines’.

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Why do chimpanzees have diverse behavioral repertoires yet lack more complex cultures? Invention and social information use in a cumulative task

Cited by 24 publications

References 97 publications

Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations

Technical reasoning bolsters cumulative technological culture through convergent transformations

Collective knowledge and the dynamics of culture in chimpanzees

Human cumulative culture and the exploitation of natural phenomena

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