Chimpanzee Cultures and Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains

Chimpanzee Cultures is an edited volume based on the work of many well known researchers including de Waal, Goodall, McGrew, and Wrangham who have all spent decades studying chimpanzees. The work summarizes material presented at two conferences allowing material from wild and captive studies to be integrated and assessed. As the title of the book suggests this work is focussed on those aspects of chimpanzee life which can be considered cultural. How much learning is involved in acquiring the ability to perform various behaviours? Do chimpanzees really ‘teach’ their young? How does learning occur? How much variability is there between populations in terms of diet, social signals and the intricacies of tool use? In order to deal with these types of questions the writers must also deal with the definitional uncertainty of what actually constitutes culture. Is culture a uniquely human characteristic? Most chimpanzee researchers argue that social learning is such an important part of becoming a functioning chimpanzee (as determined by the disastrous results of captive deprivation experiments) that the behavioural differences between groups can be classified as cultural. The potential for such differences to be due to habitat variability is taken into consideration as well as age and sex differences in behaviour, but the level of variability observed argues for population based learned solutions to problems. Another aspect of understanding chimpanzees is the impact of their long lifespans and generation times. Unlike humans who are weaned at a much earlier age, chimpanzees can afford to take years to learn their basic subsistence techniques. They can also take their time to work their way into new groups because of their long lifespan and slow reproductive rate. Thus they are not under the same pressure to maximize the input of learning by imitation or emulation in learning how to deal with their environment. This may impact how they use these two learning strategies and may be a large part of why there are such major differences in learning patterns and outcomes when they are compared with human children. Also details of social interaction among kin are extremely important in developing group social relations and these have a long time to mature in chimpanzees. The differences between common chimpanzees and bonobos in terms of developing intra-group social relations is particularly interesting in this regard and the influence of differeing patterns of aggression and affiliation between males and females in bonobos and common chimpanzees is addressed in this book.