The nature of culture: Technological variation in chimpanzee predation on army ants revisited

Schöning, Caspar; Humle, Tatyana; Möbius, Yasmin; McGrew, William C.

doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.12.002

Cited by 115 publications

(126 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…In these foraging contexts, chimpanzees have overcome the constraints of their environment through technological innovations that served to increase their tool using opportunities and in some cases, tool modifications that enhance the profitability of tool-assisted foraging [62]. Although certain aspects of opportunity may trigger tool use, mere ecological opportunity may not be sufficient to support a tool using tradition [12,55]. Rather, emergence of a particular tool behaviour may require a certain threshold of abundance: (i) to provide repeated exposure to the target resource; (ii) to make the foraging for this food resource energetically profitable; (iii) to allow the tool user to gain sufficient experience with the tool using task; and/or (iv) to provide exposure to socially transmitted information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Sanz

Morgan

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

103

146

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The emergence of technology has been suggested to coincide with scarcity of staple resources that led to innovations in the form of tool-assisted strategies to diversify or augment typical diets. We examined seasonal patterns of several types of tool use exhibited by a chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes ) population residing in central Africa, to determine whether their technical skills provided access to fallback resources when preferred food items were scarce. Chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle exhibit a diverse repertoire of tool behaviours, many of which are exhibited throughout the year. Further, they have developed specific tool sets to overcome the issues of accessibility to particular food items. Our conclusion is that these chimpanzees use a sophisticated tool technology to cope with seasonal changes in relative food abundance and gain access to high-quality foods. Subgroup sizes were smaller in tool using contexts than other foraging contexts, suggesting that the size of the social group may not be as important in promoting complex tool traditions as the frequency and type of social interactions. Further, reports from other populations and species showed that tool use may occur more often in response to ecological opportunities and relative profitability of foraging techniques than scarcity of resources.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Sanz

Morgan

2013

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

103

146

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“…16 -13a of Hö lldobler & Wilson [46]), compared with approximately 60 per cent in T. lubei. Queens show a suite of characteristics restricted to legionary ants, including physogastry, where the gaster becomes swollen, distended with sclerites widely separated by a membrane, containing expanded ovaries that allow rapid production of large numbers of eggs and so extremely large colonies [42,47,48]. -Camponotus gigas (subfamily Formicinae): southeast Asian region [45,48,49].…”

Section: Discussion (A) the Status Of Formiciine Speciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intercontinental dispersal of giant thermophilic ants across the Arctic during early Eocene hyperthermals

et al. 2011

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Early Eocene land bridges allowed numerous plant and animal species to cross between Europe and North America via the Arctic. While many species suited to prevailing cool Arctic climates would have been able to cross throughout much of this period, others would have found dispersal opportunities only during limited intervals when their requirements for higher temperatures were met. Here, we present Titanomyrma lubei gen. et sp. nov. from Wyoming, USA, a new giant (greater than 5 cm long) formiciine ant from the early Eocene (approx. 49.5 Ma) Green River Formation. We show that the extinct ant subfamily Formiciinae is only known from localities with an estimated mean annual temperature of about 208C or greater, consistent with the tropical ranges of almost all of the largest living ant species. This is, to our knowledge, the first known formiciine of gigantic size in the Western Hemisphere and the first reported cross-Arctic dispersal by a thermophilic insect group. This implies intercontinental migration during one or more brief high-temperature episodes (hyperthermals) sometime between the latest Palaeocene establishment of intercontinental land connections and the presence of giant formiciines in Europe and North America by the early middle Eocene.

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“…However, these pioneering efforts provided essential platforms for more refined approaches, some incorporating both genetic and environmental variables into analyses (27). Other advances yielded confirmatory evidence for culture through (i) more focused microhabitat analyses for specific behaviors such as ant-dipping (28,29); (ii) comparisons between neighboring communities sharing genes and habitat properties (30); and (iii) social learning experiments, as for nut-cracking (31,32).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes

Whiten

2017

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

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Discoveries about the cultures and cultural capacities of the great apes have played a leading role in the recognition emerging in recent decades that cultural inheritance can be a significant factor in the lives not only of humans but also of nonhuman animals. This prominence derives in part from these primates being those with whom we share the most recent common ancestry, thus offering clues to the origins of our own thoroughgoing reliance on cumulative cultural achievements. In addition, the intense research focus on these species has spawned an unprecedented diversity of complementary methodological approaches, the results of which suggest that cultural phenomena pervade the lives of these apes, with potentially major implications for their broader evolutionary biology. Here I review what this extremely broad array of observational and experimental methodologies has taught us about the cultural lives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans and consider the ways in which this knowledge extends our wider understanding of primate biology and the processes of adaptation and evolution that shape it. I address these issues first by evaluating the extent to which the results of cultural inheritance echo a suite of core principles that underlie organic Darwinian evolution but also extend them in new ways and then by assessing the principal causal interactions between the primary, genetically based organic processes of evolution and the secondary system of cultural inheritance that is based on social learning from others.social learning | culture | evolutionary biology | chimpanzee | orangutan R ecent decades have revealed social learning (learning from others) to be pervasive across the animal kingdom, with important implications for evolutionary biology at large (1) and the subject of the Sackler Colloquium published here (2). This article focuses on great apes: chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), and orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). Other primates are dealt with elsewhere in the issue (3, 4). Despite an early report (5), we still know little about cultural phenomena in chimpanzees' rarer sister species, the bonobo (Pan paniscus) so bonobos are omitted here. I also make only limited reference to human culture, although we are technically also great apes. Human culture is extensively treated in other papers in this issue.

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The nature of culture: Technological variation in chimpanzee predation on army ants revisited

Cited by 115 publications

References 45 publications

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Ecological and social correlates of chimpanzee tool use

Intercontinental dispersal of giant thermophilic ants across the Arctic during early Eocene hyperthermals

Culture extends the scope of evolutionary biology in the great apes

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