Ape behavior and the origins of human culture

Abstract

Identification of behavioral characteristics shared by humans and our closest primate relatives allow us to reconstruct the nature of our shared behavioral ancestry. I use this approach to infer the core features of social learning, traditions, and culture that characterized our ancestry before the evolutionary split that created chimpanzees and hominins. An extensive corpus of field observations and behavioral experiments has, in recent years, provided a substantial empirical basis through which to realize this approach to our cultural past. Features of culture shared by ourselves and chimpanzees, and thus likely to have been shared also by our common ancestor around 6 million years ago, include (1) the capacity to sustain different local cultures composed of multiple and diverse traditions, both technical and social; (2) related contents of such traditions, such as tool use; and (3) a portfolio of different social learning mechanisms, extending to both emulation and imitation, that are flexibly applied to acquire behavioral routines, with net adaptive benefit. These would have constituted a crucial platform from which our own unique and complex cultural nature evolved.