Do Primates have culture?

Philosophy was my minor in college, so I might have a little knowledge in the field.

personally I think it would be cool if I could just walk up to a woman in a bar and sniff her ass......now that's culture!!!!!

Perhaps I could sing a chorus of "Getting To Know You" while doing it......

there was a programme on about monkeys recently. they were studied in the wild and in laboratory conditions. They discovered that the ones in the lab learned quicker.

The ones in the wild picked nuts and then had to travel a mile or so to some flat rocks with cracks in them and flat stones they had collected from a river some distance away in the other direction. They always came there to crack their nuts and selected the appropriate sized crack in the rock to hold each nut, varying it with the size of each. This needed a lot of thought and organisation - the nuts a long way in one direction, tools in another direction and the 'anvil' in a fixed position,

The monkeys collaborated and helped each other and this was shown in a lab experiment . they had learnt to strike a flint to make a sharp tool (like our ancestors) and use it to get into a jar to get nuts out. They put 2 monkeys in glass cages, separated but with a small hole through which would allow them to hand something through and no more.

One monkey was given a jar with nuts in and no stone. The other monkey was given a stone - then they were watched to see if they would 1 coooperate and
2 if they did, share

They did - the monkey with the stone handed it through to the one with the jar (hopping up and down and anxiously watching then), who opened it and shared fairly - half and half - handing his share through to the other monkey.

It was like a window back in time to early early man - so yes, I definitely believe they have a culture.

That's so cool!!

My crow with a sense of humour story!

Back when I used to walk my cats, I had taken Oscar for a walk, and we were returning home.

There was a very large bush, which we were walking past. On the other side of the bush to us, a crow was standing, watching us with interest.

When Oscar saw it, he, who was a mighty hunter, immediately dropped into stalking pose - I thought this might be funny to watch - and he was on a loooooooong leash (one of those ones that roll out of a case) - so I let him go, and watched.

He crouched and crept his way around the bush - the crow casually strolling along, so as to keep the same distance between them.

Then, the crow stopped, and nonchalantly began striding around the bush the other weay, so that it was approaching Oscar.

At first, Oscar maintained his hunting pose - then he began to look anxious as the big bird strolled towards him, gradually fixing its eyes on him more and more intently.

As the bird drew closer, Oscar sat up - then, looking anxiously behind him, but, it seems, trying to look unconcerned, began walking towards me - the bird picked up speed - so did Oscar - ending up, finally, at my feet - and looking worried.

The crow came up very close - and I swear it looked sardonically amused, and eyed Oscar triumphantly. With a flick of it its tail, it strolled off, walked to the road, waited for a car to pass, and ambled across the road to join its friends on the other side of the road.....

Monkeys can be social animals, but they can also have antisocial behavior. Jane Goodall did most of the initial reserach with monkeys, and when she wrote her report on monkey behavior, many of the scientists in the field poo-pooed her research until her boyfriend (who subsequently became her husband) filmed what she reported. As they say, a picture worth a 1,000 words.

Haha, I'm laughing... I loved the Oscar and the Crow story! Isn't it great that you were there to protect him? You probably got all sorts of points on that day -- an investment in cat karma.

That crow was like the crows in my Venice neighborhood. Cool...

well i'll be a monkey's uncle!

I believe, in reality, the position is closer to a reversal of that....heehee

the crow story was lovely

I can't remember where it was but I remember a programme on animal intelligence showing crows somewhere who had learned to take nuts to the road and put them where the cars would run over them, so cracking them open - they would then collect the insides when the road cleared!

yes ci, chimpanzees have been filmed going to war on neighbouring tribes, using sticks and stones as weapons and killing them - definitely related to man

Cicerone

I will give you five reasons to proof hippopotamus are philosophers:
1. I don't know any hippopotamus that has read Hegel's "Logic".
2. They have a lifestyle similar to what Epicurus claimed to be the philosophical one.
3.I never saw an hippopotamus praying.
4. If you throw a stick to an hippopotamus he will not run like a clown to bring it back to you. (It's very problable that he smashes you).
5. I don't know any hippopotamus that has read Hegel's "Logic".

On the subject of Witty Birds:


At one point on my life I lived on College Hill. This was in the days before leash laws and dogs pretty well ran free. College Hill, an intellectual community, had a pedigreed dog pack composed of reasonably obedient dogs.

We also had a mockingbird in the neighborhood. He (it's the male mockers who are musical) learned to counterfeit the summoning whistles for most of the dogs in the pack.

I found it touching to see the mockingbird in my copper beech tree while on the ground underneath the reasonably obedient dog pack was trying to make sense of whistles-in-the-abstract.

val, 1 and 5 are the same, but you made your point. LOL

More matter for this thread:

More animals join the learning circle
27 August 2005


(Related Articles
Copycat chimps are cultural conformists
22 August 2005
Orangutans swinging culture revealed
02 January 2003
The lore of the jungle
19 June 1999 )

KILLER whales and chimpanzees both pass on "traditions" to other members of their group, according to two separate studies of feeding behaviour. The findings add to evidence that cultural learning is widespread among animals.

One study involved killer whales at Marineland in Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada. An inventive male devised a brand new way to catch birds, and passed the strategy on to his tank-mates. The 4-year-old orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish onto the water's surface. He waits below for a gull to grab the fish, then lunges at it with open jaws. "They are in a way setting a trap," says animal behaviourist Michael Noonan of Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, who made the discovery, "They catch three or four gulls this way some days."

“The orca lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish into the water. He waits for a bird to grab the fish and then lunges”Noonan had never seen the behaviour before, despite three years of observations for separate experiments. But a few months after the enterprising male started doing it, Noonan spied the whale's younger half-brother doing the same thing. Soon the brothers' mothers were enjoying feathered snacks, as were a 6-month-old calf and an older male. Noonan presented the research this month at the US Animal Behavior Society meeting in Snowbird, Utah.

Wild dolphins off the west coast of Australia were the first marine mammals in which cultural learning was observed. They apparently learn from group-mates how to use sponges to protect their snouts while scavenging (New Scientist, 11 June, p 12). But the evidence from killer whales is much more conclusive because the process was observed from start to finish.

Some researchers have suggested that many purported examples of cultural transmission can instead be explained by individuals discovering the skill on their own rather than following another's lead. But because the gull-baiting behaviour is so unusual, "it would be hard to argue that it is individual learning", says ethologist Janet Mann of Georgetown University in Washington DC, one of the authors of the dolphin sponging study. Behavioural scientist Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews in the UK agrees, "This is a particularly clear set of observations."

Whiten and his colleagues have meanwhile shown in a separate study that when chimpanzees learn a skill from their peers, they tend to stick with that method even if it isn't the most effective. Whiten's team taught two female chimps how to get food from a complicated feeder using a stick to move a barrier. One chimp learned to lift the barrier while the other was taught an apparently more efficient poking method. The chimps' group-mates were then allowed to watch their respective experts at work.

The chimps followed the lead of their own expert chimp - the poker's group preferred to poke and the lifter's group lifted (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature04047).

And even when some lifters learned to poke, the majority reverted to the group's original lifting strategy.

From issue 2514 of New Scientist magazine, 27 August 2005, page 8
Getting the message
Chimpanzees appear to be capable of communicating using sounds that refer to specific objects, according to a study of sounds made in response to different foods. It is the first time this ability has been demonstrated in chimps.

Primatologist Katie Slocombe of the University of St Andrews, UK, recorded the grunts made by chimps at nearby Edinburgh Zoo as they collected food at two feeders. One dispensed bread, considered a high-quality treat, and the other doled out apples, a much less sought-after snack.

Slocombe then played back the recordings and watched the reactions of a 6-year-old male named Liberius. The results were striking. After hearing a bread grunt, Liberius spent far more time searching around the bread feeder, while an apple grunt would send him hunting under the apple feeder. Slocombe presented the work at the US Animal Behavior Society meeting in Snowbird, Utah, this month.

This is the first convincing evidence of "referential communication" in chimps, says primatologist Amy Pollick of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Earlier research with a close cousin of the chimpanzee - a male pygmy chimpanzee, or bonobo, named Kanzi - showed that he made specific sounds for four different things: bananas, grapes, juice and yes. But the researchers did not test if the sounds conveyed any meaning to other bonobos, and the same experiments have never been done in chimpanzees.

Liberius, on the other hand, was able to take cues from apple and bread grunts made by at least three different chimpanzees.

Slocombe plans to expand her study to include chimps at the Leipzig Zoo in Germany and hopes to confirm whether the grunts refer to specific foods or to their relative quality.

Betsy Mason

New Scientist Source




Copycat chimps are cultural conformists
13:41 22 August 2005

Humans are not the only conformists in the animal kingdom. New research shows that chimpanzees also tend to imitate their peers, suggesting that the human penchant for follow-the-leader may be more deeply rooted than thought.

Chimpanzees have behavioural traditions that vary between groups in the wild but, so far, direct experimental evidence of how these traditions are spread and maintained has been lacking. So Andrew Whiten of St Andrews University, UK, led a team that sought to show a chimpanzee proclivity for cultural conformity in a population of captive animals.

Whiten demonstrated cultural learning in chimps by introducing two different tool-use techniques to two separate groups of captive chimps at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, US.

The team taught two female chimps how to get food out of a complicated apparatus using a stick. One learned to poke a barrier with the stick, and the other to lift the barrier with the stick. Then the chimps’ groups got to watch the new experts use their skills. When the rest of the groups were allowed to try their own hand at freeing the food, they followed the lead of their own expert chimp – the poker’s group preferred to poke and the lifter’s group tended to lift.

Although the poke method was more effective – as shown by the fact that some lifters independently learned to poke – the majority of lifters-turned-pokers nevertheless reverted to their group’s original lifting strategy, conforming socially.

Journal reference: Nature (online publication)

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7881




Orangutans swinging culture revealed
19:00 02 January 2003



Another behaviour seen in the orangutans was using leaves as protective gloves or napkins.



Orangutans have culture, reveals a new study combining decades of observations. Its existence suggests that the basis of human culture originated much earlier than previously thought.

The international team of scientists, led by Carel van Schaik of Duke University, North Carolina, found 24 orangutan behaviours that are passed on by imitation, a hallmark of culture. This pushes the origins of culturally transmitted behaviour back to 14 million years ago, when orangutans first evolved from their more primitive primate ancestors.

Some of the behaviours are practical, such as poking sticks into trees to gather insects, but others appear to be just plain fun. Some orangutan groups blow "raspberries" as they bed down for the night, the equivalent of our "night-night". Others indulge in "snag-riding", the sport of surfing falling dead trees and then grabbing surrounding vegetation just before hitting the ground.

The fact that some orangutans used tools while others did not prompted the collaboration to search for evidence of culture. But the researchers had not been sure they would it. "We were all rather giddy when we realised what had come out of our data," says van Schaik.

Chimps, whale and dolphins
The work follows an earlier study revealing chimpanzee culture (Nature, vol 399, p 682), which also combined many decades of observations. This suggested 39 cultural behaviours for chimps and therefore set the origin of cultural traits in primates at seven million years.

Scientists suspect cultural behaviour arose before chimps, orangutans and humans diverged because it is less likely that it arose three times independently.

Orangutans are the least related to humans of all the great apes, so if the origins of human culture is to be pushed back even further, researchers will have to start looking at other primates like monkeys, or even at whales or dolphins, says Andrew Whiten, at St Andrew's University, UK, who led the earlier chimpanzee study.

Some research suggests that whales and dolphins, large-brained and social animals that also live in ecological niches, may show cultural behaviours.

Social contact
Culture requires extensive social contact in order for the behaviours to be passed on. But unlike their more friendly chimpanzee counterparts, orangutans tend to be more solitary.

However, some orangutan groupings are more sociable than others, and these groups showed more of the identified behaviours, strengthening the argument that they are cultural.

Another concern was that the behavioural differences may be due simply to the apes adapting to different habitats. But the traits the researchers observed varied from region to region and did not depend on habitat. "It shows we are dealing with culture, not an artefact of ecology," says van Schaik.

The discovery may help us understand the roots of human culture. By showing how similar chimps and orangutans cultures are, he says, we can look at how they differ to human culture and ask what causes the differences.

But just as the study of orangutans is giving a handle on human culture, the apes are disappearing. Some of the areas included in the study have already been lost to illegal logging. "We are in a race against time," says van Schaik.

Journal reference: Science (vol 299, p 102)


http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3225

Thanks, dlowan, for making me feel much less intelligent than I felt before. (And for an interesting read too.)

Lol - I find it FASCINATING!!!!



But, I guess you all knew that...

I find it fascinating too. I just never understood what you humans think is so special about your culture in the first place. Now if you excuse me, I need to de-flea my wife.

Re: Do Primates have culture?


Yes. We do.

Yes. Generally under out toenails.