Trend-following behavior extends to chimpanzees, research demonstrates
In a fascinating development, chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust sanctuary in Zambia have been observed adopting a unique "fashion trend" - dangling blades of grass or sticks from their ear holes and behinds. This intriguing behaviour, first observed in a female chimp in 2010, has since spread amongst the chimpanzee community, shedding light on the role of social learning and interspecies copying in the emergence and spread of cultural behaviours.
Social Learning and Imitation
The trend began with a single chimpanzee, Julie, who started placing grass in her ear. Other chimps observed and imitated her behaviour, demonstrating how social learning—observing and copying others—plays a crucial role in the spread of novel behaviours. By copying each other, chimps show they notice and possibly even approve of the behaviour, which can strengthen social bonds and create a sense of belonging.
Interspecies Copying
While "interspecies copying" typically refers to behaviours adopted from other species, the concept here is more about social learning within a species. However, if we consider the broader context of cultural transmission, it shows that non-human animals can develop and adopt behaviours without direct influence from other species, but rather through social interactions within their own species.
Implications for Understanding Cultural Behaviors
1. Evolutionary Roots of Culture: The ability of chimpanzees to create and sustain traditions with no clear utility mirrors aspects of human culture, suggesting that the building blocks of social life may be more universal across species than previously thought.
2. Social Signaling and Expression: These behaviours can serve as a form of social signaling or self-expression, allowing chimps to communicate and express themselves within their social groups. This parallels human behaviours where fashion trends serve similar purposes.
3. Cultural Transmission: The study of how such behaviours spread and persist offers insights into the mechanisms of cultural transmission in non-human animals. It shows that cultural behaviours can be transmitted through generations and across groups, even after the originator of the behaviour is gone.
4. Environmental Factors: Captivity, with its abundance of free time and reduced survival pressures compared to the wild, may facilitate the emergence of such behaviours. This highlights how environmental conditions can influence the development and spread of cultural behaviours.
Interestingly, all females in the group have adopted the walking style with grass, and the chimp that swiftly adopted the style was integrated quickly into the group. Chimpanzees living in the sanctuary have more leisure time than their wild counterparts due to the lack of predators and competition. However, there is no evidence that the chimpanzees are using the objects for dealing with pain or itches.
Moreover, chimpanzees in a different group at the sanctuary started demonstrating the same behaviour more than a decade later. The behaviour was first observed in a female chimp in 2010, yet the second group started exhibiting it in 2021. The first group of chimpanzees lived around nine miles from the second group, making copying the behaviour unlikely.
Elodie Freymann, a post-doctoral affiliate at the University of Oxford, finds the study's findings about potential interspecies copying between chimps and human caretakers mind-blowing. She suggests that if chimps can copy humans, they might also be learning from and copying other non-human species.
Researchers like Freymann and Van Leeuwens, who plans to study whether chimpanzees can repeatedly innovate new foraging techniques and develop cumulative culture in the same way as humans, are excited about the possibilities this discovery opens up for understanding the origins and transmission patterns of cultural behaviours in non-human animals. This is indeed an exciting moment in primatology.
- The fashion trend of dangling blades of grass or sticks observed among chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust sanctuary signifies that lifestyle choices can extend beyond humans, as seen in the realm of fashion-and-beauty.
- As social learning plays a significant role in the emergence and spread of cultural behaviors, this unique trend among chimpanzees highlights how such behaviors can be transmitted within a species, comparable to the cultural transmission seen in home-and-garden practices.
- The study's findings of interspecies copying between chimpanzees and human caretakers suggest that science, with its focus on understanding the unknown, will increasingly reveal the similarities in the development and transmission of cultural behaviors across species, bridging the gap between human and animal life.
