Young children spontaneously invent wild great apes’ tool-use behaviours

Abstract

The variety and complexity of human-made tools are unique in the animal kingdom. Research investigating why human tool use is special has focused on the role of social learning: while non-human great apes acquire tool-use behaviours mostly by individual (re-)inventions, modern humans use imitation and teaching to accumulate innovations over time. However, little is known about tool-use behaviours that humans can invent individually, i.e. without cultural knowledge. We presented 2- to 3.5-year-old children with 12 problem-solving tasks based on tool-use behaviours shown by great apes. Spontaneous tool use was observed in 11 tasks. Additionally, tasks which occurred more frequently in wild great apes were also solved more frequently by human children. Our results demonstrate great similarity in the spontaneous tool-use abilities of human children and great apes, indicating that the physical cognition underlying tool use shows large overlaps across the great ape species. This suggests that humans are neither born with special physical cognition skills, nor that these skills have degraded due to our species’ long reliance of social learning in the tool-use domain.

Individual acquisition of “stick pounding” behavior by naïve chimpanzees

“…Thus, as we focus on the crux of the tool use behavior only we refer to the target behavior as “stick pounding” throughout this manuscript. Following the logic outlined in Tennie et al () and data from previous latent solutions tests (Allritz et al, ; Bandini & Tennie, ; Menzel et al, ; Neadle et al, ; Reindl et al, ; Tennie et al, ), we hypothesized that the target (stick pounding) behavior would be individually reinnovated by naïve individuals (therefore demonstrating this behavioral form to be a latent solution).…”

“…Thus, great apes are capable of sustaining population differences via low‐fidelity social learning mechanisms, that is via SMSR. Indeed, several studies have now demonstrated that naïve great apes (including humans; Reindl, Beck, Apperly, & Tennie, ) can reinnovate wild behavioral forms in the absence of observational opportunities (Allritz, Tennie, & Call, ; Bandini & Tennie, ; Huffman & Hirata, ; Huffman, Spiezio, Sgaravatti, & Leca, ; Menzel, Fowler, Tennie, & Call, ; Neadle, Allritz, & Tennie, ; Reindl et al, ; Tennie, Hedwig, Call, & Tomasello, ). These findings provide strong empirical support for the ZLS hypothesis, demonstrating that an individual expression approach to great ape behavioral forms is justified (as surprising as it may at first seem).…”

“…Re innovations are known behavioral forms that reappear in naïve individuals that have never observed the behavior beforehand. For example, if the same behavioral form of a wild target behavior emerges in captive, target‐naïve and ecologically representative individuals, this would count as such a “reinnovation” (for examples of reinnovations see Allritz et al, ; Bandini & Tennie, ; Menzel et al, ; Neadle et al, ; Reindl et al, ; Tennie et al, ).…”

Naïve orangutans (Pongo abelii & Pongo pygmaeus) individually acquire nut-cracking using hammer tools

“…Past LS studies have demonstrated that multiple target behavioural forms – including tool use behavioural forms – can be individually acquired by primates (see above). Furthermore, it was also shown that different species may sometimes overlap in their latent solution repertoires (Allritz et al, 2013; Bandini & Tennie, 2019, 2017; Menzel et al, 2013; Neadle et al, 2017; Reindl, Beck, Apperly, & Tennie, 2016; Tennie et al, 2008).…”

A Cultural Evolution Approach to Digital Media

“…Cultural evolutionists study things such as the evolution of uniquely human forms of cooperation (Boyd and Richerson, 2009; Turchin et al, 2013), indigenous knowledge of plants' properties (Reyes-Garcia et al, 2008), the cultural evolution of language (Tamariz et al, 2014; Kirby et al, 2015), the spread of fashions in contemporary culture, using cases like baby names (Bentley et al, 2004) or dog breeds (Ghirlanda et al, 2013, 2014), or how ineffective medical treatments can nonetheless be successful (Tanaka et al, 2009; de Barra et al, 2014; Miton et al, 2015), just to give a few examples. Similarly, a wide range of methodologies are used, including simulation and mathematical models (Acerbi et al, 2009; Kempe et al, 2014; Smaldino and McElreath, 2016), laboratory experiments (Caldwell and Smith, 2012; Derex and Boyd, 2015; Muthukrishna et al, 2015; Schillinger et al, 2016), phylogenetic analysis (Fortunato and Jordan, 2010; Tehrani, 2013; Watts et al, 2015), ethnographic research (Mathew and Boyd, 2014; Colleran and Mace, 2015), and comparative studies of social learning in humans and other animals (Whiten et al, 2009; Dean et al, 2012; Reindl et al, 2016). …”