Chimpanzee material culture: implications for human evolution

Abstract

The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, Pongidae) among all other living species, is our closest relation, with whom we last shared a common ancestor less than five million years \nago. These African apes make and use a rich and varied kit of tools. Of the primates, and even of the other Great Apes, they are the only consistent and habitual tool-users. \nChimpanzees meet the criteria of working definitions of culture as originally devised for human beings in socio-cultural anthropology. They show sex differences in \nusing tools to obtain and to process a variety of plant and animal foods. The technological gap between chimpanzees and \nhuman societies living by foraging (hunter-gatherers) is surprisingly narrow, at least for food-getting. Different communities of chimpanzees have different tool-kits, and not \nall of this regional and local variation can be explained by the varied physical and biotic environments in which they live. Some differences are likely customs based on \nnon-functionally derived and symbolically encoded traditions. Chimpanzees serve as heuristic, referential models for the reconstruction of cultural evolution in apes \nand humans from an ancestral hominoid. However, chimpanzees are not humans, and key differences exist between them, though many of these apparent contrasts remain to be \nexplored empirically and theoretically.