Table of Contents

Main

Articles
Pan the Tool-Maker
Latest Homo erectus of Java
Neandertal mtDNA
Middle Stone Age Bone Industry from Katanda
Pedra Furanda
Venus Figures

Web Sites
The Ancient Indus Valley
Stolen Stones: The Modern Sack of Nineveh
Clovis and Beyond
Chimpanzee Cultures
Oldstoneage.com

ROM Visits
Egypt Exhibit
Evolution of Man Exhibit

Bibliography 		Chimpanzee Cultures

The purpose of this website is to provide a source for documenting the culural variations in chimpanzee behaviour, and also for showing the behavioural distributions of long-term study sites in Africa.

The introduction section was very brief, but informative, and states the thesis for the website. It is very intriguing to note that there may be as many as 39 different cultures of Pan troglodytes. The site defines culture as "the passing on of behavioural traditions."

The indentifying cultural variation section cited three steps to determine if chimpanzee behaviour is actually passed down by social learning. Step 1 indentifies the difference between behaviour confined to specific subspecies, and behaviour confined to different populations of the same subspecies. Step 2 differentiates between those subspecies with different behaviour in different ecological areas, and those with different behaviours in the same ecological area. Step 3 deals with studying chimpanzees in controled environments, and documenting if and how they learn by watching others.

The species sections details which subspecies have come under study.


This is a phylogenetic tree that shows the relationship between the extant species of the Great Apes in the Order Primates. You can see that Pan paniscus (bonobos) and Pan troglodytes (common chimpanzee) are sister species to Homo sapiens.

The scientific articles are the real substance of the site, as they offer scientific documentation for cultures in chimpanzees.

The database is also very useful and informative, as it pulls all the behavioural information together into a searchable format.

There is also a detailed location section, which is very useful as a visual aid. Here you can really see where the different cultures occur in Africa. You can see how there might be some exchange of information between populations.

I highly enjoyed this site, and recommend it to anyone who might be interested in learning about chimpanzee behaviour and culture. Sometimes I only think of humans as being able to have culture. It's easy to think of everything else in nature as natural or genetically determined. It's really an eye-opening experience to see that humans have so much in common with our closest extant relatives.

Next Page