ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2018
Wild chimpanzees select tool material based on efficiency and knowledge.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Rank and payoff biases influence subject choices in a foraging task among sanctuary chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Atypical tool and object use in wild immature chimpanzees reveals developmental pathways to innovation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The effect of habitat health and environmental change on cultural diversity and richness in animals.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Protracted development of stick tool use skills extends into adulthood in wild western chimpanzees.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Monkeys who experience more feeding competition utilize social information to learn foraging skills faster.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Bone-related behaviours of captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) during two excavating experiments.Primates; journal of primatology · 2023Article
- Efficiency fosters cumulative culture across species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- DNA barcoding identifies cryptic animal tool materials.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Selecting between iron-rich and clay-rich soils: a geophagy field experiment with black-and-white colobus monkeys in the Budongo Forest Reserve, Uganda.Primates; journal of primatology · 2021Article
- Spontaneous categorization of tools based on observation in children and chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Cultural variation between neighbouring communities of chimpanzees at Gombe, Tanzania.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Raw-material selectivity in hook-tool-crafting New Caledonian crows.Biology letters · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Some animals have basic culture, but to date there is not much evidence that cultural traits evolve as part of a cumulative process as seen in humans. This may be due to limits in animal physical cognition, such as an inability to compare the efficiency of a novel behavioural innovation with an already existing tradition. We investigated this possibility with a study on a natural tool innovation in wild chimpanzees: moss-sponging, which recently emerged in some individuals to extract mineral-rich liquids at a natural clay-pit. The behaviour probably arose as a variant of leaf-sponging, a tool technique seen in all studied chimpanzee communities. We found that moss-sponges not only absorbed more liquid but were manufactured and used more rapidly than leaf-sponges, suggesting a functional improvement. To investigate whether chimpanzees understood the advantage of moss- over leaf-sponges, we experimentally offered small amounts of rainwater in an artificial cavity of a portable log, together with both sponge materials, moss and leaves. We found that established moss-spongers (having used both leaves and moss to make sponges) preferred moss to prepare a sponge to access the rainwater, whereas leaf-spongers (never observed using moss) preferred leaves. Survey data finally demonstrated that moss was common in forest areas near clay-pits but nearly absent in other forest areas, suggesting that natural moss-sponging was at least partly constrained by ecology. Together, these results suggest that chimpanzees perceive functional improvements in tool quality, a crucial prerequisite for cumulative culture.
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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.