Researchers have discovered that chimps are capable of adopting new behaviors and transmit them socially from one individual to another within a community.
It is said that this is the first clear evidence of wild chimps developing a new culture.
As the team of researchers filmed the animals at a field station in Uganda, they realized that some of them started to make a new type of sponge that could be used to help them drink.
Chimps usually use leaf sponges, which they then dip into water to drink from, but in this case the researchers observed two novel variants of the leaf sponge: leaf sponge re-use and moss sponge.
The new behavior soon spread throughout the group.
"Researchers have been fascinated for decades by the differences in behavior between chimpanzee communities; some use tools some don't, some use different tools for the same job," said Catherine Hobaiter, one of the researchers, in a news release. "These behavioral variations have been described as 'cultural,' which in human terms would mean they spread when one individual learns from another, but in most cases they're long established and it's hard to know how they originally spread within a group."
The researchers from Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland analyzed video taken by Hobaiter to work out exactly how the new tool developed and spread.
"This study tells us that chimpanzee culture changes over time, little by little, by building on previous knowledge found within the community," said Thibaud Gruber, from the University of Neuchatel and one of the researchers, according to the release. "This is probably how our early ancestors' cultures also changed over time."
"In this respect, this is a great example of how studying chimpanzee culture can help us model the evolution of human culture. Nevertheless, something must have subsequently happened in our evolution that caused a qualitative shift in what we could transmit, rendering our culture much more complex than anything found in wild apes. Understanding this qualitative jump in our evolutionary history is what we need to investigate now," Gruber added.
Findings are published in the journal PLOS Biology.
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