China News Service, Beijing, March 7 (Reporter Sun Zifa) A new animal behavior research paper published in Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature - Human Behavior" believes that chimpanzees may learn from each other (i.e., social learning) ) to learn new skills.
The study suggests that chimpanzees may have the ability to accumulate cultural evolution, a trait previously thought to be unique to humans.
The paper introduces that although there is some evidence that chimpanzees have cultures, a hypothesis called the "Zone of Potential Solutions" (ZLS) suggests that these cultures are generated by individuals copying knowledge from each other.
The ZLS hypothesis states that cultural development in great apes results from the independent re-creation of "cultural" behaviors by multiple individuals within a group. Evidence for this comes from the observation that captive apes independently develop known cultural behaviors, such as nut cracking.
The first author and corresponding author of the paper, Edwin JC van Leeuwen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and his collaborators conducted an experiment to test the ZLS hypothesis on 66 chimpanzees from a Zambian sanctuary. These orangutans were divided into two groups.
They were given a puzzle box that required three steps to open to obtain a food reward: to find a wooden ball from the forest, pull out a drawer on the apparatus and keep it open, and then put the ball into the opened drawer.
After three months of exposure to the box, the chimpanzees had not developed the necessary skills to open it.
The authors then trained one chimpanzee in each group to open the box and observed whether other chimpanzees developed the skill to open it over the next three months.
In both groups, 14 of the 66 chimpanzees developed the box-opening skill, and all saw other chimps opening boxes at least nine times from as far as 1.5 meters away.
The authors concluded that the elements of skills required to complete puzzle box design tasks may vary between individuals, and future follow-up studies suggest the need to use different techniques to test the range of chimpanzee cognitive and repetitive abilities.
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