ArticleScientific reports2023
Dialects in leaf-clipping and other leaf-modifying gestures between neighbouring communities of East African chimpanzees.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. 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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15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Chimpanzees are not more aggressive than bonobos but target sexes differently.Science advances · 2026Article
- Food culture as a mechanism of social bonding and social identity in primates.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Brokering peace in the ape (culture) wars.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Third-party imitation is not restricted to humans.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- How can we use social network analysis to better understand Chimpanzee and Gorilla sociality and communication?Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Concerted conservation actions to support chimpanzee cultures.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- What we know and don't know about great ape cultural communication in the wild.American journal of primatology · 2025Review
- The role of exploration and exploitation in primate communication.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Chimpanzees employ context-specific behavioral strategies within fission-fusion societies.Primates; journal of primatology · 2024Article
- Young sanctuary-living chimpanzees produce more communicative expressions with artificial objects than with natural objects.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Many morphs: Parsing gesture signals from the noise.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Article
- Overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Object use in communication of semi-wild chimpanzees.Animal cognition · 2023Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Dialects are a cultural property of animal communication previously described in the signals of several animal species. While dialects have predominantly been described in vocal signals, chimpanzee leaf-clipping and other 'leaf-modifying' gestures, used across chimpanzee and bonobo communities, have been suggested as a candidate for cultural variation in gestural communication. Here we combine direct observation with archaeological techniques to compare the form and use of leaf-modifying gestures in two neighbouring communities of East African chimpanzees. We found that while both communities used multiple forms, primarily within sexual solicitation, they showed a strong preference for a single, different gesture form. The observed variation in form preference between these neighbouring communities within the same context suggests that these differences are, at least in part, socially derived. Our results highlight an unexplored source of variation and flexibility in gestural communication, opening the door for future research to explore socially derived dialects in non-vocal communication.
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