Drinking Game Adds to Growing Support for Chimpanzee Culture

(LATimes, 30, January 2012) - Do chimpanzees have culture? It may depend on your definition of that slippery concept, but a new study using juice and soft straws shows that chimpanzees fill a basic requirement: They can learn new behaviours from one another.

Journal article: Basis for Cumulative Cultural Evolution inChimpanzees: Social Learning of a More Efficient Tool-Use Technique

Many researchers argue that few species, and perhaps none besides our own, have the capacity for culture – learned behaviours to spread across a population and down through future generations. (For humans, the definition would include things like beliefs, aesthetics, moral codes and knowledge, but given that chimpanzees lack language and can’t be asked about subjective thoughts, observable behaviours will have to do.)

Previous research had shown that wild chimps in separate communities would use sticks in different ways to fish for ants, a sign that such behaviours went beyond instinct. The new paper, published online Wednesday in the journal PLoS ONE, actually catches captive chimps in the act of learning such different tool uses.

The study presents "the first experimental evidence for chimpanzees' social transmission of a more efficient tool-use technique invented by a conspecific group member," according to the authors.

Researchers from Kyoto University in Japan and the University of Kent in England gave two groups of chimpanzees straws and put them in rooms with juice boxes mounted onto the wall. One group started using the 7-inch straws to dip into a hole in the juice box, while the other started using the sucking method (as humans would for a milkshake, or pretty much any other drink). 

Sucking juice through a straw was 50 times more efficient: A chimp could down 50 milliliters of juice in 30 seconds, while it would take their dipping peers 10 minutes to pull out a mere 20 milliliters.

When the researchers put a straw-sucker and a straw-dipper in the same room, they found that the dipper would quickly adopt this better, faster method if they closely observed it in action.

The demonstrating chimps didn’t seem to mind this up-close-and-personal style of learning. One video of the experiment shows a curious chimpanzee putting his face right up in the face of another chimp who was sucking the juice through a straw, then grabbing a straw of his own to try out this new, better method.

"Chimpanzees switch technique when not satisfied with their own," the study authors write. "Hence, necessity and opportunity appear to act as key prerequisites for cumulative cultural evolution."

How Language and Culture Matter in Learning - [Video]

(GeeksAreSexy, 13, Jan 2013) - Phdcomics have released a new video, this one from the Language and Linguistics department at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Sara Ciesielski is producing a thesis called “Language Development and Socialization in Sherpa” and here it is…in 2 minutes:

[Via PhDcomics)

"Sponging" dolphins pass fishing trick from mother to daughter

*Muffled* Can someone CLICK! get this CLICK!
off my CLICKIN! nose!?

(Reuters.con, 15, Oct 2012) - A small population of dolphins in Western Australia state not only use sponges to help catch fish but the rare hunting technique has been passed from mother to daughter for generations, Australian researchers said.

Sightings of dolphins carrying sponges on their snouts to protect their sensitive noses while dislodging fish and crustaceans from the rocky ocean floor has been recorded since the 1980s.

But researchers at the University of New South Wales added a new dimension to their research by using computer modeling of behavior (Social Network Analysis) and genetics to estimate how long the technique, which they call "sponging", has gone on.

"What's unique about the sponging behavior is that only about five percent of dolphins use the sponges as a tool, and it's only one maternal line," said Anna Kopps at the University of New South Wales Evolution Ecologist Research Centre.

"What's new about this study now is we've got the time perspective," she told Reuters.

Scientists believe one single female started sponging in Shark Bay, Western Australia, and all her descendants in that area learned the behavior from their mothers.

Knowing this, and that the sponging was done 30 years ago, computer modeling allowed them to study the spread of the behavior over the past three decades -- and then reverse the process using genetics and behavior to figure out when it might have begun.

Ultimately, they estimated that sponging has been going on for some 180 years, or roughly eight generations of dolphins.

"It's interesting that the behavior doesn't spread to the entire population and it doesn't go extinct either," said Kopps.

Dolphin offspring are dependent on their mothers for about four years, giving them ample time to observe and learn survival techniques. The maximum lifespan of a dolphin is about 40 years.

"We don't know if it's teaching or other forms of learning," Kopps said.

While male dolphins also learn sponging from their mothers, the study found they don't pass the technique on.

"Some males use it but not many and it will be a dead end because they don't learn from the dads," Kopps said.

Archaeologists find ancient 'child cave art' in the Dordogne

BBC Science (Sept. 30, 2011) - Jessica Cooney, an archaeologist from Cambridge University, talks about paintings found in a cave "nursery" in France.

One of the pieces of art, discovered in the cave of Rouffignac in the Dordogne, is thought to be a 13,000-year-old finger painting created by two and three-year-olds.

Jessica Cooney, speaking to the BBC's David Sillito, explains that the most prolific artist is thought to be a five-year-old girl.

Watch the video "Archaeologists find ancient 'child cave art' in the Dordogne" >>