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Community => Recreation Commons => Our researchers have made a breakthrough! => Topic started by: Buster's Uncle on September 30, 2014, 10:50:58 pm

Title: Wild chimps learning to use tools from each other may hint at humanity's past
Post by: Buster's Uncle on September 30, 2014, 10:50:58 pm

Ape See, Ape Do: Chimps Learn Skills from Each Other
LiveScience.com
By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor  2 hours ago


(http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/nfLtqYvPoEOpVAmgvMazgA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7Zmk9ZmlsbDtoPTM3MztweW9mZj0wO3E9Njk7dz01NzU-/http://media.zenfs.com/en_US/News/LiveScience.com/chimp-learning-behavior.jpeg1412099405)
A Sonso chimpanzee, from the Budongo Forest in Uganda, uses a moss-sponge in November 2011. This behavior was learned by observing her mother.



Scientists may have recorded chimpanzees learning skills from each other in the wild for the first time, according to a new study.

The finding supports the idea that humanity's closest living relatives can pass on culture and customs just as humans do, shedding light on the possible capabilities of the last common ancestor of both humans and chimps, the researchers say.

For decades, scientists have known that chimpanzee troops are often distinct from one another in the wild, possessing collections of behaviors that seem to form unique cultures. Researchers suggest that nearly 40 chimp behaviors are socially acquired, most of which involve various forms of tool use, such as wielding hammers and pestles. But the learned behaviors also include courtship rituals such as leaf-clipping, where leaves are clipped noisily with the teeth; social behaviors such as overhead hand-clasping during mutual grooming; and methods for eradicating parasites by either stabbing or squashing them.

"Researchers have been fascinated for decades by the differences in behavior between chimpanzee communities — some use tools, some don't, some use different tools for the same job," lead study author Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said in a statement. "These behavioral variations have been described as cultural, which in human terms would mean they spread when one individual learns from another, but in most cases they're long established, and it's hard to know how they originally spread within a group."

Prior experiments found that chimpanzees in captivity can learn new behaviors from each other, but there was no direct evidence of this in wild chimps. The new findings "finally bring the last piece of the puzzle by showing that this is also happening in the wild," said study co-author Thibaud Gruber, a primatologist at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland.

Scientists studied the Sonso chimpanzee community living in Uganda's Budongo Forest. They focused on the use of "leaf sponges," which the chimps use as tools to dip into water to drink. The Sonso chimps typically manufacture leaf sponges by folding and chewing leaves in their mouths.

The researchers noticed Sonso chimpanzees developed two variations of leaf-sponging — using moss sponges made from moss or a mixture of leaves and moss, or reusing leaf sponges that had been left behind on a previous visit to a watering hole. Neither moss-sponging nor leaf-sponge reuse had been detected in Sonso chimps in more than 20 years of  observation.

Hobaiter captured video footage of Nick, a 29-year-old alpha male chimpanzee, as the animal made a moss sponge while being watched by Nambi, a dominant adult female.

"We were very lucky, I must say," Gruber told Live Science. "The chimpanzees just decided to display this novel behavior right in front of us, and we only needed our camcorders to capture the scenes."

Over the next six days, seven more chimps made and used moss sponges. Six of these had observed the behavior before adopting it; the seventh reused a discarded moss sponge, and so may have learned this novel behavior that way, the researchers said.

"The spread of the behavior was very fast," Gruber said. "This shows that chimpanzees can be really fast in adopting new tools!"

The scientists also recorded a 12-year-old sub-adult male chimp retrieve and use a discarded leaf sponge. Eight other individuals adopted the reuse technique, but only four of them observed another individual reusing a sponge first.

By modeling how information might spread in a network from one chimp to another, the investigators estimated that each time a chimpanzee observed moss-sponging, the ape was 15 times more likely to develop the behavior. In contrast, social learning played much less of a role with the reuse behavior, perhaps because it was first seen among chimps of lower social rank, the researchers said.

Still, these findings are the first time scientists have tracked the way in which a new chimp behavior is passed from individual to individual in a wild community.

"Our results provide strong evidence for social transmission along the chimpanzees' social network, demonstrating that wild chimpanzees learn novel tool use from each other and support the claim that some of the observed behavioral diversity in wild chimpanzees should be interpreted as cultural," study co-author William Hoppitt, a senior lecturer in zoology at Anglia Ruskin University in England, said in a statement.

The researchers suggest that social learning originated in a common ancestor of humans and great apes, long before the rise of modern humans.

"There has been an ongoing debate about whether chimpanzee culture and human culture are evolutionary linked," Gruber said. "My answer is yes. Our findings here strongly support the idea that the last common ancestors of chimps and humans could learn cultural behaviors from each other, in a similar way as the Sonso chimpanzees did.

"Nevertheless, something must have subsequently happened in our evolution that caused a qualitative shift in what we could transmit, rendering our culture much more complex than anything found in wild apes," Gruber said. "Understanding this qualitative jump in our evolutionary history is what we need to investigate now."

The findings also highlight the need to protect wild chimpanzee communities that are currently at risk, he added.

"It is great to have finally this evidence of social learning in wild chimpanzees, but it will be to no use if chimpanzees disappear in the wild in the next 50 years," Gruber said. "The Budongo Forest, like other forests in Africa and Indonesia, is under constant threat from deforestation, and I think it is important for people to understand that it is of utmost importance to conserve chimpanzees, for themselves, for their cultural knowledge, and for all the still unknown information that they can give us about our past."

The detailed findings were published online today (Sept. 30) in the journal PLOS Biology (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001960).


http://news.yahoo.com/ape-see-ape-chimps-learn-skills-other-192610936.html (http://news.yahoo.com/ape-see-ape-chimps-learn-skills-other-192610936.html)

Title: Wild chimps learning to use tools from each other may hint at humanity's past
Post by: Buster's Uncle on October 01, 2014, 02:38:55 am

Wild chimps learning to use tools from each other may hint at humanity's past
We finally caught wild chimpanzees teaching each other new ways to drink water
The Verge
By Arielle Duhaime-Ross on September 30, 2014 02:00 pm



Under a tree in Uganda’s Budongo forest in 2013, Catherine Hobaiter first mentioned the strange chimp behaviors she'd seen two years before. Hobaiter, a chimpanzee researcher at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, told fellow primatologist Thibaud Gruber that she had witnessed a group of chimps using a mix of moss and leaves to soak up drinking water from a watering hole in the forest. In 20 years of research, no one had observed this behavior in this community of chimps, and yet Hobaiter had managed to capture the behavior on video — numerous times.

"When she told me that she had all the videos on her laptop and, most importantly, that we could probably extract from these videos all the information necessary to document the spread of the behavior within the community," Gruber says in an email to The Verge, "I knew we were in business!"

Chimpanzees are widely considered the most "cultural" of all non-human animals, Gruber says. Their ability to use tools is well-known, and their capacity to transmit those behaviors socially has garnered a lot of attention in recent years. Until now, though, observations of chimps learning to use tools from each other had only taken place in captivity — a setting that, necessarily, doesn't resemble the wild. Captivity had limited the ecological validity of the earlier findings, says Gruber, who works at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. "This has been a major point in the animal culture debate for the last 25 years," he explains, "with critics pointing out that there was no evidence so far that any of the presumed cultural behavior found in wild chimpanzees, were in fact socially learnt." As a result, some scientists think that "chimp culture" has nothing to do with the social transmission of culture in humans.

But that might soon change. Thanks to Hobaiter’s videos, researchers have been given a rare look at wild chimp society — one that, for the first time, shows the spread of a cultural behavior in the wild.

In the study, published today in PLOS Biology, Gruber and his team investigated how two new variations of "leaf-sponge" use spreads across a population. These single-use tools are usually the result of a chimp folding leaves into its mouth and subsequently using it to drink, or even to collect honey in experimental conditions. But Hobaiter’s footage showed that some chimps reuse their sponges, whereas others make them by mixing moss into the leaves. "The chimpanzees just decided to display this novel behavior right in front of us," Gruber says, "and we only needed our camcorders to capture the scenes."

Chimpanzee Tool Use (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0nCXYZ4w0U#)

With the footage in hand, the researchers gathered data and ran statistical models. The goal was to see if these novel behaviors were socially transmitted from chimp to chimp. And, according to their results, moss-sponging was a product of social learning among the chimp population. Leaf-sponge reuse, on the other hand, wasn't. What's more, every time an individual sees another chimpanzee perform a behavior, that first chimp is 15 times more likely to develop the behavior, the research showed. "Most interestingly," Gruber says, "the spread of the behavior was very fast, with seven individuals acquiring the novel behavior in only six days." This shows that chimpanzees can adopt new tools very quickly.

Due to the study’s observational nature, some researchers might object to the findings, Gruber says. "Many critics continue to think that what we collect in the field is a bunch of anecdotes, and like to claim that 'the plural of anecdotes’ isn’t data." But Gruber, who mostly focuses on experimental work, thinks that there’s value in collecting observational data in the field. It’s "highly frustrating" when people universally suggest otherwise, he says, even if you’ve collected "over 1,000 instances of the same behavior."

Still, some researchers have embraced the results. Shinya Yamamoto, a primatologist at Kobe University in Japan, told The Verge that the study’s results provide sound evidence of tool-use transmission. "We are now almost sure that chimpanzees have socially transmitted culture," he says. Yamamoto’s own work also focused on social learning and tool-use in chimps, but his experiments took place in a lab. "This is the start point of further investigation of what are similar and different between human and chimpanzee cultures — to know the basis of technology would be helpful to know the future of our technological societies."

Along those lines, Gruber thinks the findings strongly support the idea that the last common ancestors of chimps and humans could have learned cultural behaviors from each other. Moreover, chimps appear to build upon old knowledge "little by little," Gruber says, so it’s also likely that "little changes in cultural knowledge — in contrast to big qualitative jumps — characterized early hominin species." But before he can dive further into the possible implications for human evolution, researchers will have to address the specific mechanisms that allow for the transmission of chimpanzee culture. "Unless we do that, there will always be questions about whether the two phenomena are really comparable."

Unfortunately, figuring out just how "chimp culture" works will take time — time that chimpanzees might not have. Like many forests in Africa, the Budongo Forest is under constant threat from deforestation. So "it is great to have finally this evidence of social learning in wild chimpanzees, but it will be to no use if chimpanzees disappear in the wild in the next 50 years," Gruber says. That’s why "it’s of utmost importance to conserve chimpanzees, for themselves, for their cultural knowledge, and for all the still unknown information that they can give us about our past."


http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/6872899/footage-of-a-chimp-community-in-the-wild-could-have-big-implications (http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/30/6872899/footage-of-a-chimp-community-in-the-wild-could-have-big-implications)