Chimpanzees, our cultured cousins

Dipping in: Chimpanzees in the Tai National Park in Cô te d’Ivoire harvest ants by plunging their arms into the colony, or by using sticks, but there are cultural differences between groups as to how they proceed. (Photo: C. Boesch/MPI EVA.) As a species, we humans take great pride in our cultural achievements, which were traditionally thought to set us apart from all animal species, often assumed to be operating purely by instinct and innate behaviours. This traditional view is linked to a religiously tinged idea of Homo sapiens as the crowning glory of creation. Scientifi c fi ndings from Darwin through to the genome sequences of humans and apes have undermined this claim to uniqueness, demonstrating that — phylogenetically, at least — our species is, as Jared Diamond put it, “the third chimpanzee”. This realisation has even led to calls to merge the genera of Homo and Pan (Curr. Biol. (2003), 13, R464–R465). Animal rights campaigners have long argued that the level of consciousness in great apes and their similarity to humans should be suffi cient reason to give them fundamental rights and exclude them from invasive experimentation. Protective legislation inspired by the similarity of apes and humans has been passed in New Zealand, Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden. Now even our claim to culture as a unique selling point is losing its shine to some extent, if we look beyond opera and Ovid and defi ne culture broadly as socially learned behaviour patterns that are not inherited genetically. Research has uncovered cultural traditions of this kind in a wide range of species from chimpanzees to hairy-nosed wombats and even in whales and bumblebees, as was discussed at a recent ASAB meeting on ‘Social Learning and Culture’ held in London in December (bit.ly/1NtPcTP), following directly after a similar meeting focusing on primates. If the aim is to assess and understand the relationship of our species to our mammalian relatives, such issues are most meaningfully