Chimpanzees are natural copycats
Research involving a big stone, a small stone and a nut has provided surprising new information into how chimpanzees solve problems. Scientist Kathelijne Koops, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, gave this basic toolkit to two groups of chimps living in Guinea, west Africa. One group, living at Bossou, soon showed that they knew how to use the small stone as a hammer and the big one as a block on which to smash the nut and get at the goodness inside. However, another group, living just four miles away in Seringbara, were totally clueless about what to do.
The surprising difference shows that chimps are not born with the skill to crack nuts (unlike a bird’s ability to build its nest, for example). Instead, it seems, nut-cracking is learned by watching and copying others who have already mastered the skill – in the same way that us humans learn many of our own skills from watching each other. Koops and her team spent more than a year studying the two groups, and not one chimp in Seringbara managed to crack the nut – even after they were given opened ones to taste. She says the nut-cracking group in Bossou might have discovered the technique by accident, or perhaps it was worked out by one highly intelligent chimp long ago. The skill would then have been learned and passed on to others who might have improved the technique.
This is how different groups of humans develop the abilities and habits that mark out a certain culture, and it seems the same may be true of chimps. “Our findings suggest that chimpanzees acquire cultural behaviours more like humans,” Koops said, “and do not simply invent a complex tool-use behaviour like nut-cracking on their own.”