ArticleNature human behaviour2022
Field experiments find no evidence that chimpanzee nut cracking can be independently innovated.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. 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.
- Chimpanzee culture beyond the conspicuous: Evidence for broad-scale observational social learning in wild individuals.iScience · 2026Article
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Culture is critical in driving orangutan diet development past individual potentials.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- A continuous record of early human stone tool production.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 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
- Camera Traps Document Infant Corpse Carrying Behaviour in Multiple Unhabituated Chimpanzee Populations.Ecology and evolution · 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
- Reliable long-term individual variation in wild chimpanzee technological efficiency.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) mentally represent collaboration?: Action-learning and communication in a partnered task.PloS one · 2025Article
- What we know and don't know about great ape cultural communication in the wild.American journal of primatology · 2025Review
- Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative.Nature human behaviour · 2025Review
- Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Article
- Ecological, social, and intrinsic factors affecting wild orangutans' curiosity, assessed using a field experiment.Scientific reports · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cumulative culture has been claimed a hallmark of human evolution. Yet, the uniqueness of human culture is heavily debated. The zone of latent solutions hypothesis states that only humans have cultural forms that require form-copying social learning and are culture-dependent. Non-human ape cultural behaviours are considered 'latent solutions', which can be independently (re-)innovated. Others claim that chimpanzees, like humans, have cumulative culture. Here, we use field experiments at Seringbara (Nimba Mountains, Guinea) to test whether chimpanzee nut cracking can be individually (re-)innovated. We provided: (1) palm nuts and stones, (2) palm fruit bunch, (3) cracked palm nuts and (4) Coula nuts and stones. Chimpanzee parties visited (n = 35) and explored (n = 11) the experiments but no nut cracking occurred. In these experiments, chimpanzees did not individually (re-)innovate nut cracking under ecologically valid conditions. Our null results are consistent with the hypothesis that chimpanzee nut cracking is a product of social learning.
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Registered trials
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