Chimpanzees not only pass on their knowledge and techniques for using tools from one generation to another, but may also gain innovative skills from each other, a group of scientists has revealed.
It could be one of the reasons why chimpanzee groups display behavioral differences, a research team announced today before the closing of a Beijing-based international symposium on primatology.
A long-term study of chimpanzees in western Africa by an international team of scientists found chimpanzees tended to learn from so-called innovators, often young individuals.
Scientist Toshisada Nishida said the tribe would lean by imitation and then pass on the different behavioural pattern to the next generation.
Nishida, a researcher at the Zoology department of Kyoto University in Japan, is attending the 19th Congress of the International Primatological Society, which has been organized by the Institute of Zoology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
He said the learning process may have resulted in similar chimpanzee gestures having different meanings.
For example, almost every sexually active chimpanzee of Mahale, in western Africa's Guinea, lets others know of their intention to mate by repeatedly pulling a tree leaf between their lips to produce a sound.
However, this gesture of courtship, known as leaf clipping, is used by another chimpanzee population without such intentions.
Other behavioural differences have been observed by Nishida and his colleagues in the areas of rock-throwing and grooming.
"These differences cannot be simply explained by the environmental differences at each site," Nishida said.
"It shows chimpanzees are probably more intelligent than we expected with such an innovative learning pattern."
(China Daily August 9, 2002)
