ReviewPrimates; journal of primatology2018
Cumulative culture in nonhumans: overlooked findings from Japanese monkeys?
Review in Primates; journal of primatology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- The evolution of the concepts of 'primate culture' in Western science.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Review
- Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Reliable long-term individual variation in wild chimpanzee technological efficiency.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- What we know and don't know about great ape cultural communication in the wild.American journal of primatology · 2025Review
- In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2024Article
- Article
- Conditions under which faithful cultural transmission through teaching promotes cumulative cultural evolution.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Quantum Leaps in Human Biocultural Evolution and the Relationship to Cranial Capacity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Cumulative cultural evolution and mechanisms for cultural selection in wild bird songs.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Field experiments find no evidence that chimpanzee nut cracking can be independently innovated.Nature human behaviour · 2022Article
- Children transition from simple associations to explicitly reasoned social learning strategies between age four and eight.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The Primates 2021 Most-Cited Paper Award.Primates; journal of primatology · 2021Article
- Professor Masao Kawai, a pioneer and leading scholar in primatology and writer of animal stories for children.Primates; journal of primatology · 2021Article
- Temporal stability of chimpanzee social culture.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Chimpanzees' behavioral flexibility, social tolerance, and use of tool-composites in a progressively challenging foraging problem.iScience · 2021Article
- Molecular histology of spermatogenesis in the Japanese macaque monkey (Macaca fuscata).Primates; journal of primatology · 2021Article
- The evolution of high-fidelity social learning.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Using Experimental Research Designs to Explore the Scope of Cumulative Culture in Humans and Other Animals.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cumulative culture, generally known as the increasing complexity or efficiency of cultural behaviors additively transmitted over successive generations, has been emphasized as a hallmark of human evolution. Recently, reviews of candidates for cumulative culture in nonhuman species have claimed that only humans have cumulative culture. Here, we aim to scrutinize this claim, using current criteria for cumulative culture to re-evaluate overlooked qualitative but longitudinal data from a nonhuman primate, the Japanese monkey (Macaca fuscata). We review over 60 years of Japanese ethnography of Koshima monkeys, which indicate that food-washing behaviors (e.g., of sweet potato tubers and wheat grains) seem to have increased in complexity and efficiency over time. Our reassessment of the Koshima ethnography is preliminary and nonquantitative, but it raises the possibility that cumulative culture, at least in a simple form, occurs spontaneously and adaptively in other primates and nonhumans in nature.
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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.