Journal ArticleDOI
Orangutan Cultures and the Evolution of Material Culture
Carel P. van Schaik,Marc Ancrenaz,Gwendolyn Borgen,Biruté M. F. Galdikas,Biruté M. F. Galdikas,Cheryl D. Knott,Ian Singleton,Akira Suzuki,Sri Suci Utami,Sri Suci Utami,Michelle Y. Merrill +10 more
TLDR
A correlation between geographic distance and cultural difference, a correlation between the abundance of opportunities for social learning and the size of the local cultural repertoire, and no effect of habitat on the content of culture mean that great-ape cultures exist and may have done so for at least 14 million years.Abstract:
Geographic variation in some aspects of chimpanzee behavior has been interpreted as evidence for culture Here we document similar geographic variation in orangutan behaviors Moreover, as expected under a cultural interpretation, we find a correlation between geographic distance and cultural difference, a correlation between the abundance of opportunities for social learning and the size of the local cultural repertoire, and no effect of habitat on the content of culture Hence, great-ape cultures exist, and may have done so for at least 14 million yearsread more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis
TL;DR: Supporting the cultural intelligence hypothesis and contradicting the hypothesis that humans simply have more “general intelligence,” it is found that the children and chimpanzees had very similar cognitive skills for dealing with the physical world but that theChildren had more sophisticated cognitive skills than either of the ape species for dealingWith the social world.
Journal ArticleDOI
Demography and cultural evolution: How adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses: The Tasmanian case
TL;DR: A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies as discussed by the authors.
MonographDOI
The Evolution of Language
TL;DR: The authors exploit newly available massive natu- ral language corpora to capture the language as a language evolution phenomenon. But their work is limited to a subset of the languages in the corpus.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ratcheting up the ratchet: on the evolution of cumulative culture
TL;DR: This work argues that chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species’ existing cognitive repertoire that are generated by founder effects, individual learning and mostly product-oriented (rather than process-oriented) copying.
Journal ArticleDOI
Comparison of the Mantel test and alternative approaches for detecting complex multivariate relationships in the spatial analysis of genetic data.
TL;DR: Numerical simulations show that in tests of significance of the relationship between simple variables and multivariate data tables, the power of linear correlation, regression and canonical analysis is far greater than that of the Mantel test and derived forms, meaning that the former methods are much more likely than the latter to detect a relationship when one is present in the data.
References
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The Detection of Disease Clustering and a Generalized Regression Approach
TL;DR: The technic to be given below for imparting statistical validity to the procedures already in vogue can be viewed as a generalized form of regression with possible useful application to problems arising in quite different contexts.
Book
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
TL;DR: Tomasello as discussed by the authors argued that the roots of the human capacity for symbol-based culture, and the kind of psychological development that takes p[lace within it, are based in a cluster of unique human cognitive capacities that emerge early in human ontogeny.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cultures in chimpanzees
Andrew Whiten,Jane Goodall,William C. McGrew,Toshisada Nishida,Vernon Reynolds,Yukimaru Sugiyama,Caroline E. G. Tutin,Richard W. Wrangham,Christophe Boesch +8 more
TL;DR: It is found that 39 different behaviour patterns, including tool usage, grooming and courtship behaviours, are customary or habitual in some communities but are absent in others where ecological explanations have been discounted.
Journal ArticleDOI
Culture in whales and dolphins
Luke Rendell,Hal Whitehead +1 more
TL;DR: The complex and stable vocal and behavioural cultures of sympatric groups of killer whales (Orcinus orca) appear to have no parallel outside humans, and represent an independent evolution of cultural faculties.
Journal ArticleDOI
Toward a Phylogenetic Classification of Primates Based on DNA Evidence Complemented by Fossil Evidence
Morris Goodman,Calvin A. Porter,John Czelusniak,Scott L. Page,Horacio Schneider,Jeheskel Shoshani,Gregg F. Gunnell,Colin P. Groves +7 more
TL;DR: A provisional primate classification based on DNA evidence and the time scale provided by fossils and the model of local molecular clocks has all named taxa represent clades and assigns the same taxonomic rank to those clades of roughly equivalent age.