Is Culture a Golden Barrier Between Human and Chimpanzee ?

Stephen Jay Gould said once that humanity has an unfortunate tendency to erect “golden barriers” to set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Is culture becoming one of those golden barriers? For many of us, material culture constitutes most of the external world we encounter in our daily lives. In the occidental world, material culture is so pervasive that for some of us it is the main goal of life. If, however, we were Bwa pygmies living in a tropical rainforest or Aborigines living in the open plains of Australia, our material belongings would be much more limited. This comparison indicates the extreme variability that exists in human material culture. However, human cultures are not only material, but also include beliefs, social rules, knowledge, and language. As a result of the incredible complexity of human cultures, we praise ourselves as distinct from other living beings for our uniquely rich and complex beliefs, thoughts, and knowledge. Indeed, all humans on earth are cultural animals, living in societies with specific cultural rules and traditions that infiltrate all aspects of our life. This fact has been elevated to a dogma, making humans the only living beings on earth with culture. Culture frees us from the natural world, whereas all others living animals are mainly influenced by nature. But is that dogma really so? Recently this golden barrier has come under question, as increasing evidence from primates, birds, and even marine mammals supports the existence of repeated population differences in behavior patterns, the acquisition of new behavior patterns learned from group members, and the presence of flexible material cultures.1–5 Other contributors to this special issue on culture will address these aspects, and I refer interested readers to their contributions.6,7 The topic I particularly want to address here is the general attributes that chimpanzee culture may share with human culture, as a step toward better understanding of how and to what degree they differ. Primatologists first became receptive to the notion of culture in animals when they observed the invention of potato-washing behavior by the young macaque, Imo, and saw it acquired by her playmates.8,9 Imo’s actions shook a golden barrier and opened the way to examining cultural differences in a variety of species. Since that time, research on wild chimpanzees has reached the stage where it is now possible to compare behaviors of different well-known populations living in different places throughout the African range of this species.1 I will use this information to extract the cultural attributes that are apparent in chimpanzees. To compare chimpanzee and human cultures, we first need to decide what is meant when speaking of culture. Anthropologists have argued over this concept since the beginning of their discipline and agreement remains minimal.10–12 Many definitions include the world “man,” and thereby exclude any other species a priori and make any studies about the emergence of cultural phenomenon in any other species impossible or illegitimate. However, culture is not the exclusive property of anthropologists; other fields of science have, in the meantime, started to examine various Christophe Boesch has studied the chimpanzees of the Taı̈ National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, since 1979 and provided precise descriptions of the specific hunting techniques of this population and detailed accounts of their nut-cracking behavior. He has observed the chimpanzees of Gombe and Mahale in Tanzania to deepen our knowledge of cultural differences in this species. Together with Andrew Whiten, he initiated the chimpanzee culture project that culminated in a paper on chimpanzee culture in 1999.