Do Primates have culture?

I have been in contact with the Koko Foundation since last week about getting public performance rights for their most recent film. The PR person mentioned, in passing, an author from Seattle who is on a book tour about her memoir among gorillas. The book is Songs of the Gorilla Nation : My Journey Through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes. Anybody read it?

I have not read it, but it got some good reviews.

Anthro departments often end up with a strange collection of people in them. The one I'm in has a Quartenary Geologist ( a lot of prehistoric archaeology deals with the Quartenary). This is because anthropology is a holistic science. That is we not only study humans but anything connected with humans (context). In the 50's and 60's there was an attempt to make anthropology part of abroad spectrum approach to the social sciences in which psychology focused on the individual, sociology focused on behavior in groups, and anthropology focused on culture. That attempt at a tripart division has more or less faded, in part because each continued to poach of the domain of the others. That may be how Tooby ended up in an anthropology department. As far as I know Tooby is a psychologist.

Ah, so. Tooby dooby doo!

truth
Acquiunk, it's my feeling that anthropology is a Frankenstein monster of sorts. A department I'm familiar with has archaeologists (prehistorians), primatologists, physical anthropologists, political anthropologists, psychological anthropologists, social anthropologists (with traditional interests in things like kinship organizations and kinship terminological systems), an anthropological linguist, a geneticist, a cultural anthropologist (folklorist), etc. These people all call themselves practicioners of the same discipline: anthropology, and insist that their speciality is to learn everything about humankind (biology, culture, politics, social organization, languages, etc.), everywhere in the world, and throughout time. Some ambition. Members of different sub-disciplines can't talk to each other. I think that they should be distributed among other departments, for example the primatologist should be in zoology, the geneticist and other physical anthropologists should be in biology (as human biologists), the linguist in the language department, the political anthropologist in political science, the archaeologist in the history department, social and cultural anthropologists in sociology, psychological anthropologist in psychology, and so forth. At least each sub-discipline member could be able to talk to his new colleagues. What do you think?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm:


Sex differences found in chimpanzee learning
Females learn skills from mothers faster than males, study finds
Updated: 6:09 p.m. ET April 15, 2004LONDON - Young female chimpanzees learn certain hunting and gathering skills from their mothers much faster than their male counterparts -- who prefer to spend their time playing, researchers said on Wednesday.


In a study of wild chimps from the Gombe National Park in Tanzania, researchers found distinct sex-based differences in the way the young animals developed the skill of fishing for termites, despite their mothers paying equal attention to both sexes and being as tolerant with males as females.

"To our knowledge, this is the first systematic evidence of a difference between the sexes in the learning or imitation of a tool-use technique in wild chimpanzees," researchers Elizabeth Lonsdorf, Lynn Eberly and Anne Pusey wrote in the Nature scientific journal.

"A similar disparity in the ability of young males and females to learn skills has been demonstrated in human children and may be indicative of different learning processes."

In a four-year-long field study, Lonsdorf and her colleagues observed 14 young chimps and their mothers engaged in "fishing" in termite mounds with tools they make out of nearby vegetation.

They found that although the mothers had the same amount of social interaction with both sexes, and were equally patient with males and females, the young females learnt the skill as much as 27 months earlier than their male siblings.

The young females also chose to spend more time watching and learning from their mothers, while the males spent significantly more time playing, the study found.

The researchers said their results -- although based only on a small group -- may indicate that sex-based learning differences may date back at least to the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

Would be very interesting to conduct the same study in a different population of chimps, and see if the same sort of results emerged.

I suspect they would, but think of the implications if they didn't (and if further studies in both groups corroborated earlier results).

Hmmmmm.....

Hmmmm, what?

Just hmmmmmmm...... (I'm tired...)

hmmmmm

wot?

Too bad we're not both primates. We could contemplatively groom each other. As it is, I'm getting hungry. Another life, perhaps. (Slobber...)

We groom with the fingies...

E.G., after reading the book that'd I'd left out after transcribing from it here, got the video "Koko's Kitten" for sozlet at the library.

Whoa!

I realized I hadn't watched Koko since I became fluent in sign... really, really cool. A few observations:

- She not only picked up signs per se, but human body language (as a separate thing.) She knows how to use sighs, eye-rolls, laughing, and the like to communicate. Gorillas in the wild have sophisticated ways of communicating, too -- grunts, physical attitudes -- but that's not what she was doing.

- The video was not captioned but I could pretty clearly understand what she was saying throughout. The things that didn't make sense turned out to usually have explanations... for example, she kept saying "red" in contexts that confused me, and E.G. told me that the narration had explained that was her code for "mad."

- The "All Ball" mystery solved! She clearly just said "Ball." I dunno where "all" came from, but she was saying just "ball" whenever it came up on the video. (The video was about All Ball.)

- (Two combined): It would absolutely suck to be Penny. Koko reminded me startlingly of some of my lower-language clients -- lack of boundaries (though Penny is of course her "mom"), lack of impulse control, short fuse, and just the language itself. She really really so strongly reminded me of one young woman I worked with. That kind of solid presence, the eyes, the bursts of sign that sort of but not really made sense, the gratitude when it was figured out... freaky.

Anyway, this young woman was in my program for maybe 4 months, didn't trust me for a long time, and had basic social skills... she didn't leap onto my lap to hug and kiss me and didn't weigh 800 pounds. And didn't LIVE with me. Koko is probably cuter in her gorilla way, but Penny has got to have no life at all. Eek.

Wow - that is way interesting, Soz!!!!!

duplicate deleted.

Wow indeed! I'm sooo happy I pointed you to Koko at the beginning of this thread!

Your observations also made me understand Piffka's point about ethics much better. Turning gorillas into retarded kind-of-humans is indeed pretty freaky -- probably because all our moral philosophies make a clear, binary distinction between humans and non-humans, and the Kokos of the world have proved this distinction very brittle. The creepy thing isn't so much that Penny is doing anything unethical, which she doesn't. It's that our ethical beliefs themselves are challenged by the existence of semi-humans, and we would instinctively prefer not to be challenged on something this fundamental.

An interesting piece which i heard on NPR yesterday used precisely the term culture to refer to the practices of food gathering and socializing which chipanzees pass on to their offspring. The actual burden of the piece was to point to the markedly more rapid manner in which juvenile females learned than their juvenile male counterparts, and i wish they had discussed the cultural aspects more. It immediately made me think of this thread.


(Edit: Ooops, i see the Wabbit beat me to the punch with this story.)

Thomas, yes, thanks!

I'd say that my client was probably closer to Koko than she (my client) was to, say, Paul Krugman.