10 research outputs found
Cumulative culture in nonhumans : overlooked findings from Japanese monkeys?
The authors thank Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) for funding DS’s visit to Koshima and Prof. Tetsuro Matsuzawa for funding WCM’s visit to Koshima.Cumulative culture, generally known as the increasing complexity or efficiency of cultural behaviors additively transmitted over successive generations, has been emphasized as a hallmark of human evolution. Recently, reviews of candidates for cumulative culture in nonhuman species have claimed that only humans have cumulative culture. Here, we aim to scrutinize this claim, using current criteria for cumulative culture to re-evaluate overlooked qualitative but longitudinal data from a nonhuman primate, the Japanese monkey (Macaca fuscata). We review over 60 years of Japanese ethnography of Koshima monkeys, which indicate that food-washing behaviors (e.g., of sweet potato tubers and wheat grains) seem to have increased in complexity and efficiency over time. Our reassessment of the Koshima ethnography is preliminary and nonquantitative, but it raises the possibility that cumulative culture, at least in a simple form, occurs spontaneously and adaptively in other primates and nonhumans in nature.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Object manipulation and tool use in Nicobar long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis umbrosus)
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Springer in International Journal of Primatology on 08/09/2020, available online: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10764-020-00141-y
The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Object manipulation and tool use by non-human primates have received considerable
attention from primatologists and anthropologists, because of their broad implications
for understanding the evolution of tool use in humans. To date, however, most of the
studies on this topic have focused on apes, given their close evolutionary relationship
with humans. In contrast, fewer studies on tool use and object manipulation have been
conducted on monkeys. Documenting and studying object manipulation and tool use in
species that are more distantly related to humans can provide a broader perspective
on the evolutionary origins of this behaviour. We present a detailed description of toolaided behaviours and object manipulation by Nicobar long-tailed macaques ( Macaca
fascicularis umbrosus ) living along the coastlines of Great Nicobar Island. We made
observations from December 2018 to March 2019, using ad libitum and focal
sampling methods. We observed behaviours related to object manipulation and tool
use in six different behavioural contexts (foraging, hygiene, communication, play, selfdirected and self-hygiene behaviour) involving eight different types of objects, namely
resonance rod, play object, rolling platform, scraping tool, dental groom, pounding
substrate, leaves as grip pads and wipers, and stimulation tool. We observed that
males were involved in tool use and object manipulation more frequently than females.
Our results add to existing records of object manipulation, tool-use behaviour and tool
variants displayed by non-human primates, showing that Nicobar macaques perform
multiple and diverse tool-aided behaviours