MEDIA REVIEW Exploration of Culture in Chimpanzees Review of The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology by

William McGrew’s excellent volume The Cultured Chimpanzee: Reflections on Cultural Primatology is an apt book at this time in the history of primatology. It extends his previous book, Chimpanzee Material Cultures: Implications for Human Evolution [McGrew, 1992], and more recent publications that argued for the concept of culture in apes [e.g., Whiten et al., 1999], while setting the groundwork for the discipline of cultural primatology. Numerous descriptions of nonhuman culture have been published of late, but many are essentially a list of potentially cultural behaviors. McGrew goes beyond this by incorporating a variety of different research methods to address chimpanzee culture, and concludes that chimpanzee (and primate) culture is far more similar to human culture than it is to that of most other taxa. McGrew’s main argument is that culture in primates is similar to that in humans, as opposed to most other species, which lack culture altogether. Culture, he argues, requires great diversity and flexibility in cultural behaviors, which are both exhibited by humans and primates. However, other taxa (with the possible exception of cetaceans) are cultural ‘‘one-trick ponies,’’ that show impressive feats of social learning, but no flexibility, diversity, or innovation beyond the one example of social learning in which they happen to be particularly gifted. Prior to making this argument, he provides the theoretical and empirical foundations for cultural primatology, which he then uses as criteria to distinguish those with culture from those without. It is perhaps in his attempt to establish criteria for culture and mechanisms for the study of culture that McGrew makes his most valuable contribution. Cultural primatology (the name is an intentional knockoff of ‘‘cultural anthropology’’) utilizes the best features of cultural anthropology, archeology, psychology, and zoology to elucidate primate culture. These disciplines allow for complete ethnography as well as an understanding of material artifacts (which is particularly valuable since much of ape culture is material) and psychological mechanisms, all under the umbrella of evolution. While there have been other assertions that humans and apes are similarly cultural, this ambitious contribution is invaluable in providing a mechanism for scientific inquiry that allows quantitative comparisons and testable hypotheses to be made on a variety of different levels. It is also, to my knowledge, the first explicit attempt to apply human ethnography techniques to a nonhuman species. While cultural anthropologists are likely to take issue with his assessment of the current field (he spends a lot of time denigrating the postmodern movement and the overreliance