Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 278, Issue 1704, Pages 408-416Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1112
Keywords
culture; social learning; genetics; chimpanzees; Pan troglodytes
Categories
Funding
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Max Planck Society
- National Science Foundation (USA)
- Leakey Foundation
- Wenner-Gren Foundation
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [21310150] Funding Source: KAKEN
- Division Of Behavioral and Cognitive Sci
- Direct For Social, Behav & Economic Scie [0849380] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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The question of whether animals possess 'cultures' or 'traditions' continues to generate widespread theoretical and empirical interest. Studies of wild chimpanzees have featured prominently in this discussion, as the dominant approach used to identify culture in wild animals was first applied to them. This procedure, the 'method of exclusion,' begins by documenting behavioural differences between groups and then infers the existence of culture by eliminating ecological explanations for their occurrence. The validity of this approach has been questioned because genetic differences between groups have not explicitly been ruled out as a factor contributing to between-group differences in behaviour. Here we investigate this issue directly by analysing genetic and behavioural data from nine groups of wild chimpanzees. We find that the overall levels of genetic and behavioural dissimilarity between groups are highly and statistically significantly correlated. Additional analyses show that only a very small number of behaviours vary between genetically similar groups, and that there is no obvious pattern as to which classes of behaviours (e. g. tool-use versus communicative) have a distribution that matches patterns of between-group genetic dissimilarity. These results indicate that genetic dissimilarity cannot be eliminated as playing a major role in generating group differences in chimpanzee behaviour.
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