ArticleBiology letters2021
Temporal stability of chimpanzee social culture.
Article in Biology letters, 2021. 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.
- Freedom of choice supports social complexity in chimpanzees.iScience · 2026Article
- Flexible use of multimodal communicative strategies in adult chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Chimpanzees employ context-specific behavioral strategies within fission-fusion societies.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2024Article
- Article
- Group-level signatures in bonobo sociality.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Norm reinforcement, not conformity or environmental factors, is predicted to sustain cultural variation.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Guinea baboons are strategic cooperators.Science advances · 2023Article
- Biased cultural transmission of a social custom in chimpanzees.Science advances · 2023Article
- Chimpanzees communicate to coordinate a cultural practice.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Empirical challenges from the comparative and developmental literature to the Shared Intentionality Theory - a review of alternative data on recursive mind reading, prosociality, imitation and cumulative culture.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Review
- The experimental emergence of convention in a non-human primate.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Temporal stability of chimpanzee social culture.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals).Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
Culture is a hallmark of the human species, both in terms of the transmission of material inventions (e.g. tool manufacturing) and the adherence to social conventions (e.g. greeting mannerisms). While material culture has been reported across the animal kingdom, indications of social culture in animals are limited. Moreover, there is a paucity of evidencing cultural stability in animals. Here, based on a large dataset spanning 12 years, I show that chimpanzees adhere to arbitrary group-specific handclasp preferences that cannot be explained by genetics or the ecological environment. Despite substantial changes in group compositions across the study period, and all chimpanzees having several behavioural variants in their repertoires, chimpanzees showed and maintained the within-group homogeneity and between-group heterogeneity that are so characteristic of the cultural phenomenon in the human species. These findings indicate that human culture, including its arbitrary social conventions and long-term stability, is rooted in our evolutionary history.
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