Animal Culture: Chimpanzee Table Manners?

Animal Culture: Chimpanzee Table Manners?

(Figure 1A,B). These results illustrate that DCC distribution is dynamically specified by developmental changes in gene expression. The aspect of transcriptional activity recognized by the DCC is unknown. Possibilities include chromatin features (e.g., nucleosome-free regions or variants and modifications of histones), or the transcription machinery itself. One suspect is histone H3 K4 methylat...

Animal Culture: Chimpanzee Conformity?

Culture-like phenomena in wild animals have received much attention, but how good is the evidence and how similar are they to human culture? New data on chimpanzees suggest their culture may even have an element of conformity.

Silence and table manners: when environments activate norms.

Two studies tested the conditions under which an environment (e.g., library, restaurant) raises the relevance of environment-specific social norms (e.g., being quiet, using table manners). As hypothesized, the relevance of such norms is raised when environments are goal relevant ("I am going there later") and when they are humanized with people or the remnants of their presence (e.g., a glass o...

The knowns and unknowns of chimpanzee culture.

Claims of culture in chimpanzees appeared soon after the launch of the first field studies in africa.1 The notion of chimpanzee 'material cultures' was coined,2 and this was followed by a first formal comparison, which revealed an astonishing degree of behavioural diversity between the different study communities, mainly in terms of tool use.3 Although this behavioural diversity is still undisp...

Toward Animal Cell Culture