Wild chimpanzees scaffold youngsters’ learning in a high-tech community

Across human history, the spiraling complexities of our technologies have been accompanied by a progressive elaboration in the schooling necessary to instill the skills that increasingly technological societies require. Among peoples who still subsist by foraging for wild foodstuffs using a toolkit that can be carried on one’s back, there is much to learn (1), but extensive formal schooling is unnecessary, as seems likely for our species’ long hunting and gathering past. By contrast, children in the societies that read this journal experience over a decade of schooling, and technical apprenticeships often last many years. Ape technologies, although much simpler than our own, also have been found, in recent years, to show much regional variation in complexity. Some populations display unimagined levels of sophistication in their manufacture and use of tools (2), significantly exceeding the complexity seen in other communities (3). Comparing 2 such relatively high-tech and low-tech communities, Musgrave et al. (4) report in PNAS that, by analogy with the human technology−education linkages sketched above, young chimpanzees’ social learning is more highly structured in the high-tech population, differing especially in the ways mothers offer costly support to the efforts of their offspring, which the authors class as an elementary form of teaching.

What counts as a relatively high-tech chimpanzee culture? Musgrave et al. (4) studied chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo, where previous studies have documented unusually sophisticated techniques to harvest termites (2). These contrast with the approaches documented at other locations across Africa, including Gombe, Tanzania, chosen as a relatively low-tech community for comparison (5). At Gombe, chimpanzees fish by inserting a single flexible probe into a termite mound, and utilize a variety of interchangeable materials for this, such as grass stems, bark, or twigs. At Goualougo, by contrast, chimpanzees harvest termites from the deep subterranean …

↵¹Email: a.whiten{at}st-andrews.ac.uk.