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Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate

Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in...

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Autores principales: Claidière, Nicolas, Smith, Kenny, Kirby, Simon, Fagot, Joël
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2014
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240982/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25377450
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1541
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author Claidière, Nicolas
Smith, Kenny
Kirby, Simon
Fagot, Joël
author_facet Claidière, Nicolas
Smith, Kenny
Kirby, Simon
Fagot, Joël
author_sort Claidière, Nicolas
collection PubMed
description Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in order to better evaluate our closest relatives' cultural capacities. Previous studies using transmission chain experimental paradigms, in which the behavioural output of one individual becomes the target behaviour for the next individual in the chain, show that cultural transmission can lead to the progressive emergence of systematically structured behaviours in humans. Inspired by this work, we combined a pattern reproduction task on touch screens with an iterated learning procedure to develop transmission chains of baboons (Papio papio). Using this procedure, we show that baboons can exhibit three fundamental aspects of human cultural evolution: a progressive increase in performance, the emergence of systematic structure and the presence of lineage specificity. Our results shed new light on human uniqueness: we share with our closest relatives essential capacities to produce human-like cultural evolution.
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spelling pubmed-42409822014-12-22 Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate Claidière, Nicolas Smith, Kenny Kirby, Simon Fagot, Joël Proc Biol Sci Research Articles Culture pervades human life and is at the origin of the success of our species. A wide range of other animals have culture too, but often in a limited form that does not complexify through the gradual accumulation of innovations. We developed a new paradigm to study cultural evolution in primates in order to better evaluate our closest relatives' cultural capacities. Previous studies using transmission chain experimental paradigms, in which the behavioural output of one individual becomes the target behaviour for the next individual in the chain, show that cultural transmission can lead to the progressive emergence of systematically structured behaviours in humans. Inspired by this work, we combined a pattern reproduction task on touch screens with an iterated learning procedure to develop transmission chains of baboons (Papio papio). Using this procedure, we show that baboons can exhibit three fundamental aspects of human cultural evolution: a progressive increase in performance, the emergence of systematic structure and the presence of lineage specificity. Our results shed new light on human uniqueness: we share with our closest relatives essential capacities to produce human-like cultural evolution. The Royal Society 2014-12-22 /pmc/articles/PMC4240982/ /pubmed/25377450 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1541 Text en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2014 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Articles
Claidière, Nicolas
Smith, Kenny
Kirby, Simon
Fagot, Joël
Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate
title Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate
title_full Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate
title_fullStr Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate
title_full_unstemmed Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate
title_short Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate
title_sort cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate
topic Research Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240982/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25377450
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1541
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