Do Chimpanzees Have Culture? What can we learn from the fact that chimps can teach each other?

PHILADELPHIA—August, 16, 2007—Do Chimpanzees have culture? The cover story in the August issue of The Scientist reports on whether current findings answer this question, and what the data says about humans’ shared evolutionary history with chimps.

Through decades of field observation, researchers such as Jane Goodall identified dozens of actions they said linked human and chimp behavior. Today’s researchers have found that maintaining specific behaviors within social groups, such as hand-clasps, kissing noises and using leaf napkins to clean the body is evidence of culture among apes. “If you eat with chopsticks and I eat with a knife and fork, we call that a cultural difference because we know it’s not in your genes to each with chopsticks,” says primatologist Frans de Waal, “so we call that a cultural variation in humans, and for the same reason, we use that term [for chimpanzees].”

However, this claim is controversial, reports staff writer Bob Grant. “The claim of chimpanzee culture fuels arguments from those who consider human culture a distinct and unparalleled evolutionary advance,” writes Grant. Bennett Galef, former president of the Animal Behavior Society, puts it this way: “We’re building cathedrals and walking on the moon, and they still sit naked in the rain.”

Although these recent observations of customs, summarized in an interactive graphic at The-Scientist.com, have supported the claim that wild chimpanzees share and maintain behavioral patters that approximate human culture, these studies may reveal more about humans than they do about chimpanzees. “Though no suite of ape behaviors can match the rich tapestry of human cultural traditions, they may be revealing a primitive form of cultural behavior that originated somewhere in our shared evolutionary history,” Grant says. In primatology, the assumption is that chimpanzee culture is the closest example of how our ancestors began. “We started adding to it and expanding it, so it is all a continuum,” de Waal explains.

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