Spontaneous reoccurrence of "scooping", a wild tool-use behaviour, in naive chimpanzees.

ABSTRACT: Modern human technological culture depends on social learning. A widespread assumption for chimpanzee tool-use cultures is that they, too, are dependent on social learning. However, we provide evidence to suggest that individual learning, rather than social learning, is the driver behind determining the form of these behaviours within and across individuals. Low-fidelity social learning instead merely facilitates the reinnovation of these behaviours, and thus helps homogenise the behaviour across chimpanzees, creating the population-wide patterns observed in the wild (what here we call "socially mediated serial reinnovations"). This is the main prediction of the Zone of Latent Solutions (ZLS) hypothesis. This study directly tested the ZLS hypothesis on algae scooping, a wild chimpanzee too

SUBMITTER: Bandini E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5611899 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature