ArticlePLoS biology2014
Social network analysis shows direct evidence for social transmission of tool use in wild chimpanzees.
Article in PLoS biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 119 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
119 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 325 citations in OpenAlex.
- Chimpanzees demonstrate individual differences in social information use.Animal cognition · 2018Pooled it
- Variation in cultural attitude, knowledge and individual motivational factors impact engagement and tool use in a field experiment in wild chimpanzees.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Network analysis highlights socio-demographic patterns of stone tool-using primates.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Rank and payoff biases influence subject choices in a foraging task among sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Chimpanzee culture beyond the conspicuous: Evidence for broad-scale observational social learning in wild individuals.iScience · 2026Article
- Could non-humans have Traditional Ecological Knowledge? And if so, what should we do about it?Journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine · 2026Article
- Animal cultures matter for conservation, but also to animals.Learning & behavior · 2026Review
- Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Atypical tool and object use in wild immature chimpanzees reveals developmental pathways to innovation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Insect applications to open wounds by chimpanzees in the wild: first insights from East African chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Mapping nonhuman cultures with the Animal Culture Database.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Emergence of a novel drinking innovation in an urban population of sulphur-crested cockatoos,Biology letters · 2025Article
- Concerted conservation actions to support chimpanzee cultures.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Cultural processes and demography: implications for conservation and beyond.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Integrating culture into primate conservation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- The growing methodological toolkit for identifying and studying social learning and culture in non-human animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Network-based multi-omics integrative analysis methods in drug discovery: a systematic review.BioData mining · 2025Review
- Social tolerance and role model diversity increase tool use learning opportunities across chimpanzee ontogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Cultural evolution, social ratcheting and the evolution of human division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
59 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
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Abstract
Social network analysis methods have made it possible to test whether novel behaviors in animals spread through individual or social learning. To date, however, social network analysis of wild populations has been limited to static models that cannot precisely reflect the dynamics of learning, for instance, the impact of multiple observations across time. Here, we present a novel dynamic version of network analysis that is capable of capturing temporal aspects of acquisition--that is, how successive observations by an individual influence its acquisition of the novel behavior. We apply this model to studying the spread of two novel tool-use variants, "moss-sponging" and "leaf-sponge re-use," in the Sonso chimpanzee community of Budongo Forest, Uganda. Chimpanzees are widely considered the most "cultural" of all animal species, with 39 behaviors suspected as socially acquired, most of them in the domain of tool-use. The cultural hypothesis is supported by experimental data from captive chimpanzees and a range of observational data. However, for wild groups, there is still no direct experimental evidence for social learning, nor has there been any direct observation of social diffusion of behavioral innovations. Here, we tested both a static and a dynamic network model and found strong evidence that diffusion patterns of moss-sponging, but not leaf-sponge re-use, were significantly better explained by social than individual learning. The most conservative estimate of social transmission accounted for 85% of observed events, with an estimated 15-fold increase in learning rate for each time a novice observed an informed individual moss-sponging. We conclude that group-specific behavioral variants in wild chimpanzees can be socially learned, adding to the evidence that this prerequisite for culture originated in a common ancestor of great apes and humans, long before the advent of modern humans.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.