Culture Club: Chimpanzees Have Different Cultures

Chimpanzee communities across Africa display cultural diversity in how they fish for termites, akin to different greetings or chopstick etiquette in humans.

Chimpanzees in Kibaale Forest National Park. Credit: Sandra Aceng / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

A group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany studied 11 communities of chimpanzees across Africa known to exhibit termite fishing behaviour to look for different techniques. They noticed that some chimpanzees, for example, use one twig to dig out the termites while others use two, and some fish sitting down while others lie down.

Each aspect was assessed to make sure it wasn't just a response to particular termite mounds, ie. an ecological preference rather than social preference; in total, the researchers identified 30 non-ecologically constrained elements. They then looked at whether some of these specific termite fishing techniques were more commonly displayed by individual chimpanzees within a community than those from different communities.

The authors discovered that the number and combination of techniques used was more similar within communities than between them, suggesting that the specific techniques were being learned socially within groups. This means that chimpanzees, like humans, also have shared cultures and etiquettes.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0890-1

Boesch, C., Kalan, A.K., Mundry, R. et al. Chimpanzee ethnography reveals unexpected cultural diversity. Nat Hum Behav (2020).