Humans were previously believed to be the only species to engage in cumulative practice, chimpanzees also engage in “cumulative practice” and pass knowledge from one generation to next, a new study carried out by primatologists at the University of St. Andrews has discovered.
Cumulative practice refers to the process that allows subsequent generations to build on the skills practiced by their ancestors.
In this study, researchers presented a group of chimps with the challenge of using different types of straws to slurp juice out of a container. Researchers used some simple straws as well as some complicated options “needed to be unfolded, with a valve which needed to be unscrewed to create a long straw to reach the juice.”
One group of chimpanzee was trained on using the complicated straw. Surprisingly, researchers found that other chimpanzees were able to watch and learn and later use the complex straw too.
According to Professor Andrew Whiten, who led the study, chimps together “can create more advanced steps in cultural evolution.”
“Perhaps the most fundamental thing this study shows is that a group of chimpanzees can appear more intelligent than any single individual – together they can create more advanced steps in cultural evolution,” he added.
“Our chimpanzees were capable of learning increasingly complex behaviors by observing knowledgeable individuals,” said lead author Gillian Vale.
“This and other recent studies are beginning to show that some non-human animals are better equipped to improve the complexity of their cultural behaviors over time than was previously believed.”
Scientists also observed that cumulative progress occurred only when a challenging ‘ecological change’ was created by the experimenter.
The new findings, according to scientists, are important for understanding what may have happened in the course of human evolution as new skills were required to deal with radical ecological changes particularly during ice ages.
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