Chimp ‘culture’ paper retracted after authors spot errors, now has home at another journal

thanks to Geraldine F for the link!
from retraction watch

The authors of a 2011 paper claiming that chimp “culture” has more to do with local habitats than with where the chimps live have retracted it after finding mistakes in their work.

Here’s the notice for the paper, “Variation in chimpanzee ‘culture’ is predicted by local ecology, not geography:”

Shortly after our above paper was published in Biology Letters, we discovered several coding errors in the dataset we analysed. After re-analysing a corrected dataset, we did not find the same results as in our publication. In contrast, we found that no ecological variable was a statistically significant predictor of behavioural variation. Consequently, we do not feel that the main result of our publication is valid and have requested retraction of this manuscript.

So how did the errors come to light? Corresponding author Jason Kamilar, formerly of Yale and now at Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona, tells Retraction Watch:

A colleague contacted me about a week after the paper appeared on Biology Letters’ Early View to request the dataset. We originally used a couple of different methods to code the data and we conducted the analyses about 2 years ago. After looking at the datasets in more detail I noticed several errors that likely was likely due to coding the data from a separately coded dataset instead of the original dataset. I confirmed the problem by re-analyzing the correct dataset and I obtained different results. I contacted the editors of Biology Letters and we agreed that retracting the paper was the best course of action.

We wanted to know whether the retraction would have a significant effect on the field.

I think the impact will be quite minor. The retraction occurred less than 2 months after the paper appeared online, and it was never actually published in an issue. In addition, I submitted a new version of the manuscript that contained the correct dataset and analysis, which is now in press in Journal of Human Evolution.

Not surprisingly, the new paper found the opposite of the original results:

…geography, and longitude in particular, was the best predictor of behavioral variation.

The authors were also transparent in the new paper, which includes a line noting the retraction:

Our paper also serves as correction to our recently retracted study (Kamilar and Marshack, 2011), which contained several coding errors in the dataset.

Kamilar, we should note, is as critical of others’ work as he is of his own. Late last year, he was a co-author of a Comment in Science alleging flaws in a May 2011 report on whether dinosaurs were nocturnal. Its abstract:

Schmitz and Motani (Reports, 6 May 2011, p. 705) claimed to definitively reconstruct activity patterns of Mesozoic archosaurs using the anatomy of the orbit and scleral ring. However, we find serious flaws in the data, methods, and interpretations of this study. Accordingly, it is not yet possible to reconstruct the activity patterns of most fossil archosaurs with a high degree of confidence.

The response from the original paper’s authors wasn’t anything like a retraction; it was more like doubling down:

Hall et al. claim that it is not yet possible to infer the diel activity patterns of fossil archosaurs with high confidence. We demonstrate here that this assertion is founded on unscreened data, untenable assumptions, and inappropriate methods. Our approach follows ecomorphological and phylogenetic principles in a probabilistic framework, resulting in statistically well-supported reconstructions of diel activity patterns in Mesozoic archosaurs.

See no evil, hear no evil?

The Right Way to Talk to Young Girls About Beauty

I wouldn't normally post something about parenting BUT after reading this a few days ago, I can't stop thinking about. I guess what's bothering me about it is, that even if it is unpleasant, looks DO matter. Reading it though, I get the feeling that Schwyzer is trying to convince us that it is a cultural construct. So really, probably no matter what you do as a parent, tell you daughter (or son) they are gorgeous all the time, or never tell them that they are, your kid is going to end up caring about physical attractiveness. Which in one way is a relief I guess, since its one less way to screw up your offspring. -MA

--
from Jezebel
by Hugo Schwyzer

This past Christmas night, my wife, daughter, and I went visited some friends for dinner. When my daughter walked through the door resplendent in a new outfit from Santa, our host, Tom, exclaimed "You look beautiful, Heloise!" His partner, Kate, shushed him. "You're not supposed to tell little girls that they're pretty," she said, offering Eira and me an apologetic smile. "It gives them a complex."

As Heloise ran off to play with the other kids, my wife and I assured Tom and Kate that we had no problem with a friendly compliment on our daughter's appearance. But as she soon explained, like so many others, Kate had read and been influenced by one of the viral articles of 2011, Lisa Bloom's How to Talk to Little Girls. (According to Facebook, it was the 12th most-shared article of 2011). In her much-read piece, Bloom argues that the best way to inoculate little girls against poor body image is to focus on everything but their looks. Praise their intellects but not their prettiness, she urges, telling the story of her encounter with a friend's five year-old daughter, Maya. Bloom recounts spending an evening talking books with little Maya, forcing herself to stay away from any discussion of appearance.

Not once did we discuss clothes or hair or bodies or who was pretty. It's surprising how hard it is to stay away from those topics with little girls, but I'm stubborn.

Bloom suggests that this stubborn avoidance of "beauty talk" will constitute "one tiny bit of opposition to a culture that sends all the wrong messages to our girls. One tiny nudge towards valuing female brains." As a father to a daughter as well as someone who lectures and writes around body image, I'm all for pushing back against our society's toxic messages about women's bodies and their self-worth. But I'm not at all convinced that refusing to talk about fashion or beauty is the best answer.

For many years, I've offered a class at Pasadena City College called "Beauty and the Body in the Western Tradition." The course looks at the intersecting histories of fashion, faith, and body ideals from the classical era to the present. Every time I teach it, I hear from students who express excitement about being able to study beauty as an academic subject.

Many explain that they were shamed or teased for having an interest in dress and hair when they were younger. A common theme: many very bright young women who were passionate about clothes report having had these interests belittled or mocked. They tell stories of being called "shallow" or "vain" for their interest in fashion. Caroline, one of the best students I've ever taught, told me that her high school math and English teachers were always surprised when she did well on tests or answered difficult questions. She said they saw her assiduous attention to her appearance (and the copies of Vogue that poked out of her bag) and dismissed her as a lightweight. "The message I got — from teachers even more than other students — was that smart girls don't care about clothes, and girls who care about clothes aren't smart. I said ‘fuck that.'" When Caroline told that story in class one day, she got vigorous nods of agreement. Her experience of being shamed for her interest in beauty is, as my students continually remind me, painfully common.

Lisa Bloom and my friend Kate make the same mistake of embracing a false dichotomy that says we can either talk to girls about beauty or talk to them about books, but not both. They believe that the only way to encourage young women's intellectual development is to do what Bloom admits is the very difficult work of totally avoiding anything that has to do with appearance in order to focus solely on the mind. (Though she doesn't mention sports, Bloom presumably would have less of a problem focusing on athletics — as long as the emphasis is on what girls' bodies do rather than how they look).

In a culture that reminds them at every turn that their primary value is in their looks, girls do need constant encouragement that their minds matter as well. It is vital to talk to girls about books, about politics, about art, about sports, about ideas. But girls also need help navigating the confusing messages they get about their bodies. Very few problems are solved by not talking about them. That's as true of girls' feelings about beauty as anything else.

There's a difference, of course, between never talking to girls about clothes or make-up (which sends the unhelpful message that such concerns are trivial, or evidence of superficiality) and actively praising little girls for being pretty. Bloom suggests we shouldn't do either; others, like Kate, worry more about the latter. Certainly, many adults do lavish attention on girls' looks. But that's only a problem when they don't compliment anything else. When girls are lauded for their other qualities, when they get support about their other interests, then attention for their appearance gets healthily integrated into the symphony of encouragement that all children need and deserve.

A day doesn't go by that I don't tell my daughter how beautiful she is. But I also praise her for the other things she does, and as she has grown more vocal, I engage her in conversation in a host of other topics. I read to Heloise every night — and each night, I help her pick out her outfit for the following day. My little girl loves clothes as well as books. And I want to encourage her in both passions without privileging either.

Obviously, I'm much more circumspect about complimenting my students' looks. But in my professional work, I am careful to emphasize that beauty and fashion are worthy areas of historical inquiry as well as personal fascination. Lisa Bloom calls on adult women to be role models to girls by talking about ideas, accomplishments, and favorite books. That's wonderful advice. But if clothes or hair turn out to be an area of mutual interest, it's vital to talk about those things too. Girls need role models who can share how to cope with the pressures of a looks-obsessed culture. And sometimes, they need role models who can show them that a passion for fashion isn't shallow, and that an interest in beauty can co-exist with a deep devotion to the life of the mind.

Fongoli chimps exhibit sharing behavior like humans

from Iowa State news
Study by ISU's Pruetz finds savanna chimps exhibit sharing behavior like humans

Sharing food has widely been considered by scholars as a defining characteristic of human behavior. But a new study by Iowa State University anthropology professor Jill Pruetz now reports that chimpanzees from her Fongoli research site in Senegal also frequently share food and hunting tools with other chimps.
Co-authored by ISU anthropology graduate student Stacy Lindshield, their study is posted online in Primates and will be published in a future issue of the journal.
The researchers witnessed 41 cases of Fongoli chimpanzees willingly transferring either wild plant foods or hunting tools to other chimpanzees. While previous research by primatologists had documented chimps transferring meat among other non-relatives, this is the first study to document non-meat sharing behavior.

"They're [the Fongoli chimps] not the only chimps that share, but in terms of the resources that we cover here, that is unique," said Pruetz (left), who was named a 2008 National Geographic Emerging Explorer for her world-renowned research on savanna chimpanzees in Senegal. "I guess all chimps share meat, but they don't share plants or tools. Yet they do here, in addition to meat. It was intriguing when we first started seeing these events."

Breaking new ground on chimp sharing
The researchers document a frequency of sharing previously unreported for chimpanzees. The chimps commonly transferred meat and wild plant foods, but they also transferred tools, honey and soil. Most of the transfer behavior was classified as recovery or passive sharing, with females commonly taking food from males -- with much of that taking place from dominant to subordinate recipients.
Of the 41 witnessed events, Fongoli male chimps transferred wild foods or tools to females 27 times. While Christina Gomes and Christopher Boesch from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology authored a 2009 study proposing that males and females exchange meat for sex -- resulting in males increasing their mating success and females increasing their caloric intake to overcome the energy costs and potential injury from hunting -- Pruetz contends that's not all that's going on in the cases she's witnessed.

"It's a different set of relationships within the social group [at the Fongoli site], and I tend to think again that it ties back to the environment and the fact that the resources are distributed differently," said Pruetz, who is also ISU's Walvoord Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "They have a big home range -- about 10 times bigger than Jane Goodall's range in Gombe at 86 square kilometers -- and that forces them to stay together. If they split up like chimps normally do, it could be days or weeks or months before they may see someone again -- and chimps are more social than that. So I think they stay together like monkeys and they move around their home range together."

Pruetz sees some of the sharing behavior between males and females as a product of the "food for sex" theory. The ISU researchers found that both adult females in estrus [the period of maximum sexual receptivity of the female] and adolescent females cycling to estrus were more likely to receive food from adult male chimps. Pruetz says that the male chimps may use food transfer as a future mating strategy with the adolescent females, particularly since there are a relatively small number of females in the Fongoli community.

"It may be used as a strategy [by the male chimps], anticipating a long-term gain on their behavior," she said. "We see that in baboons who have special friends."
The environmental impact on sharing

As the only habituated community of chimpanzees living in a savanna environment, the researchers conclude that Fongoli provides detailed information on the effect of an open, dry and hot environment on social behavior and organization. Pruetz theorizes that it may also shed some light on how the earliest humans first came to share.
"There are aspects of human behavior, and I think that's interesting because it's not exactly the same, but it may give you an idea of how it [sharing among early humans] started," Pruetz said. "It's at least one scenario and how it could have come about in our own lineage. To me, it just reinforces how important environment was."

Orangutan Culture Develops Like Human Culture

Thanks to Geraldine F and Zoran A for the link
from WIRED.com
By Olivia Solon

A team of anthropologists have shown that orangutans may have the ability to learn socially and pass these lessons down through generations — evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots.

In humans, certain behavioral innovations tend to be passed down from generation to generation through social learning. Many consider the existence of culture in humans to be one of the key factors that differentiates us from other animals.
Around a decade ago, biologists observing great apes noticed geographical variations in behavior that suggested that they were passing certain innovations down through generations, just as humans do. To this day, there is much debate about whether geographical variations in behavior is driven culturally or through genetic and environmental factors.

Researchers from the University of Zurich have now studied whether the geographic variation of behavioral patterns in nine orangutan populations in Sumatra and Borneo can be explained by cultural transmission. They have concluded that it can.

The team analyzed more than 100,000 hours of behavioral data and created genetic profiles of more than 150 wild orangutans. They measured the ecological differences between the habitats of the different populations using satellite imagery and remote sensing techniques.

Co-author of the study, published in Current Biology, Carel van Schaik said: “The novelty of our study is that, thanks to the unprecedented size of our dataset, we were the first to gauge the influence genetics and environmental factors have on the different behavioral patterns among the orangutan populations.”

Environmental influences and, to a lesser degree, genetic factors did play an important role in defining differences in social structure and behavioral ecology between the populations. However, these factors did not explain the behavioral patterns.

Michael Krützen, the first author of the study, said: “The cultural interpretation of the behavioral diversity also holds for orangutans — and in exactly the same way as we would expect for human culture. It looks as if the ability to act culturally is dictated by the long life expectancy of apes and the necessity to be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions.”

Classic Clip: Chimpanzee Culture and Medicine Usage

Livia W reminded me of this classic chimp culture clip, featuring Dr. Boesch and the infamous Dr.Wrangham ant-bitten lip scene

culture more then consumption determines reaction to alcohol

Thanks to Geraldine F for the link
from the BBC

by Kate Fox
Viewpoint: Is the alcohol message all wrong?
Many people think heavy drinking causes promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour. That's not necessarily true, argues Kate Fox.

I am a social anthropologist, but what I do is not the traditional intrepid sort of anthropology where you go and study strange tribes in places with mud huts and monsoons and malaria.

I really don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to unpronounceable corners of the world in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when in fact the weirdest and most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep. I am of course talking about my own native culture - the British.

And if you want examples of bizarre beliefs and weird customs, you need look no further than our attitude to drinking and our drinking habits. Pick up any newspaper and you will read that we are a nation of loutish binge-drinkers - that we drink too much, too young, too fast - and that it makes us violent, promiscuous, anti-social and generally obnoxious.

Clearly, we Brits do have a bit of a problem with alcohol, but why?

The problem is that we Brits believe that alcohol has magical powers - that it causes us to shed our inhibitions and become aggressive, promiscuous, disorderly and even violent.

But we are wrong.

In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, "Oi, what you lookin' at?" and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, "Hey babe, fancy a shag?" and start groping each other.

The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol.

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call "ambivalent" drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours - cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life - about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as "integrated" drinking cultures.

This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption - most integrated drinking cultures have significantly higher per-capita alcohol consumption than the ambivalent drinking cultures.

Instead the variation is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations about the effects of alcohol, and different social rules about drunken comportment.

This basic fact has been proved time and again, not just in qualitative cross-cultural research, but also in carefully controlled scientific experiments - double-blind, placebos and all. To put it very simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.

The British and other ambivalent drinking cultures believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when in these experiments we are given what we think are alcoholic drinks - but are in fact non-alcoholic "placebos" - we shed our inhibitions.

We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.

Our beliefs about the effects of alcohol act as self-fulfilling prophecies - if you firmly believe and expect that booze will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. In fact, you will be able to get roaring drunk on a non-alcoholic placebo.

And our erroneous beliefs provide the perfect excuse for anti-social behaviour. If alcohol "causes" bad behaviour, then you are not responsible for your bad behaviour. You can blame the booze - "it was the drink talking", "I was not myself" and so on.

But it is possible to change our drinking culture. Cultural shifts happen all the time, and there is extensive evidence (again from carefully controlled experiments, conducted in natural settings such as bars and nightclubs) to show that it doesn't take much to effect dramatic changes in how people behave when they drink.

These experiments show that even when people are very drunk, if they are given an incentive (either financial reward or even just social approval) they are perfectly capable of remaining in complete control of their behaviour - of behaving as though they were totally sober.

To achieve these changes, we need a complete and radical re-think of the aims and messages of all alcohol-education campaigns. So far, these efforts have perpetuated or even exacerbated the problem, because almost all of them simply reinforce our beliefs about the magical disinhibiting powers of alcohol.

The drinkaware website, for example, warns young people that a mere three pints of beer (ie a perfectly normal evening out) "can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour", that "you might start saying things you don't mean and behaving out of character", that alcohol is implicated in a high percentage of sexual offences and street crimes, and that the morning after "you may wonder what you did the night before".

I would like to see a complete change of focus, with all alcohol-education and awareness campaigns designed specifically to challenge these beliefs - to get across the message that a) alcohol does not cause disinhibition (aggressive, sexual or otherwise) and that b) even when you are drunk, you are in control of and have total responsibility for your actions and behaviour.

Alcohol education will have achieved its ultimate goal not when young people in this country are afraid of alcohol and avoid it because it is toxic and dangerous, but when they are frankly just a little bit bored by it, when they don't need to be told not to binge-drink vodka shots, any more than they now need to be told not to swig down 15 double espressos in quick succession.

Even the silliest teenagers would not dream of doing that. And not because they have been educated about the dangers of a caffeine overdose - although there undoubtedly are such dangers - but because it would just be daft, what would be the point?

What we should be aiming for is a culture where you don't need alcohol-education programmes, any more than we now need coffee or tea education programmes.

If I were given total power, I could very easily engineer a nation in which coffee would become a huge social problem - a nation in which young people would binge-drink coffee every Friday and Saturday night and then rampage around town centres being anti-social, getting into fights and having unprotected sex in random one-night stands.

I would restrict access to coffee, thus immediately giving it highly desirable forbidden-fruit status. Then I would issue lots of dire warnings about the dangerously disinhibiting effects of coffee.

I would make sure everyone knew that even a mere three cups (six "units") of coffee "can lead to anti-social, aggressive and violent behaviour", and sexual promiscuity, thus instantly giving young people a powerful motive to binge-drink double espressos, and a perfect excuse to behave very badly after doing so.

I could legitimately base many of my scary coffee-awareness warnings on the known effects of caffeine, and I could easily make these sound like a recipe for disaster, or at least for disinhibition and public disorder.

It would not take long for my dire warnings to create the beliefs and expectations that would make them self-fulfilling prophecies. This may sound like a science fiction story, but it is precisely what our misguided alcohol-education programmes have done.

Over the past few decades the government, the drinks industry and schools have done exactly the opposite of what they should do to tackle our dysfunctional drinking. I remain perhaps stupidly optimistic that eventually they will find the courage to turn things around and start heading in the right direction.

Pet parrots that are let loose in the wild are teaching native birds to talk.

From Australian Geographic

BY:HANNAH PRICE

NO NEED TO THINK you're going bird-brained if you hear mysterious voices from the trees - it's likely just a curious cockatoo wanting a chat. Native parrots, especially cockatoos, seem to be learning the art of conversation from their previously domesticated friends.

The Australian Museum's Search and Discover desk, which offers a free service to identify species, has received numerous reports of encounters with talkative birds in the wild from mystified citizens who thought they were hearing voices.

Martyn Robinson, a naturalist who works at the desk, explains that occasionally a pet cockatoo escapes or is let loose, and "if it manages to survive long enough to join a wild flock, [other birds] will learn from it."

Birds mimic each other
As well as learning from humans directly, "the birds will mimic each other," says Jaynia Sladek, from the Museum's ornithology department. "There's no reason why, if one comes into the flock with words, [then] another member of the flock wouldn't pick it up as well."

'Hello cockie' is the most common phrase, though there have been a few cases of foul-mouthed feathered friends using expletives which we can't repeat here.

The evolution of language could well be passed on through the generations, says Martyn. "If the parents are talkers and they produce chicks, their chicks are likely to pick up some of that," he says. This phenomenon is not unique; some lyrebirds in southern Australia still reproduce the sounds of axes and old shutter-box cameras their ancestors once learnt.

Birds of a feather chat together
In rural areas talking parrots will probably begin to lose their language abilities, says Martyn, with some words "likely to just disintegrate a bit and become part of that particular flock's repertoire."

However, in Australia's big cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, cockatoos will probably maintain and improve their vocabulary due to regular contact with humans. "That's certainly the case in the Botanic Gardens [in Sydney]," says Martyn. "If you say 'hello' or 'hello cockie' to the cockatoos, and if they're interested in you and not just picking around for food, you may well trigger a response."

PAN African chimpanzee census, counting chimps and mapping culture

Apes in Africa: The cultured chimpanzees
by Gayathri Vaidyanathan
From NATURE NEWS

pdf can be downloaded here

Do chimpanzees have traditions? As wild populations dwindle, researchers are racing to find out.

Thump! Thump! Thump! As the hollow sound echoes through the Liberian rainforest, Vera Leinert and her fellow researchers freeze. Silently, Leinert directs the guide to investigate. Jefferson 'Bola' Skinnah, a ranger with the Liberian Forestry Development Authority, stalks ahead, using the thumping to mask the sound of his movement.

In a sunlit opening in the forest, Skinnah spots a large adult chimpanzee hammering something with a big stone. The chimpanzee puts a broken nut into its mouth then continues pounding. When Skinnah tries to move closer, the chimp disappears into the trees. By the time Leinert and her crew get to the clearing, the animal is long gone.

For the past year, Leinert has been trekking through Sapo National Park, Liberia's first and only protected reserve, to study its chimpanzee population. A student volunteer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, Leinert has never seen her elusive subjects in the flesh but she knows some of them well. There's an energetic young male with a big belly who hammers nuts so vigorously he has to grab a sapling for support. There are the stronger adults who can split a nut with three blows. And there are the mothers who parade through the site with their babies. They've all been caught by video cameras placed strategically throughout Sapo.

Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations1, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. Population numbers have plunged — although no one knows by exactly how much because in most countries with great apes, the animals have never been properly surveyed.

The Pan Africa Great Ape Program, the first Africa-wide great-ape census to be mounted, could change that. In addition to surveying chimpanzee numbers (see 'How many chimpanzees are left?'), project scientists plan to set up automated video and audio recording devices at 40 research sites in 15 countries with chimp populations. Led by Christophe Boesch, director of the primatology department at the EVA, and Hjalmar Kühl, also at the EVA, the programme aims to get a picture of how chimpanzee behaviour — from nut cracking to vocal calls — varies across Africa. Ultimately, the hope is to learn about the origins and extent of what, in humans, would be called culture.

Until recently, scientists regarded culture — defined as socially transmitted behaviours — as exclusive to humans, but there is growing recognition that many animals exhibit some sort of culture. Chimpanzees, which share 98% of their genes with humans, have the most varied set of behaviours documented in the animal world. The difference between humans and animals is growing less distinct, say some researchers. "It is not black and white," says Kühl, who is Leinert's supervisor at the EVA.

In the old scenario, "only humans have culture", says Jason Kamilar, a biogeographer in the department of anthropology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "Then, culture would be the defining feature of humanity, which evolved some time after the split between the human and chimp lineages," he says. But "if chimps have culture, then presumably the last common ancestor of chimps and humans had culture".

Mapping Behaviour
Some chimps dance slowly at the beginning of rain showers, others don't; some use long sticks to dig up army ants; others use short sticks. In West Africa, some chimp groups hammer nuts with a stone or a piece of wood to open them. But east of the river Nzo-Sassandra, which cuts across Côte d'Ivoire, only one group has been seen cracking nuts.

So far, researchers have observed these variations over years spent studying groups of chimpanzee that have been carefully habituated to the presence of humans. There are just 12 such colonies in Africa (see 'Chimpanzee census'), the most famous of which is in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, where primatologist Jane Goodall worked.

In 1999, evolutionary psychologist Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews, UK, and his colleagues compiled a list of behaviours seen in seven of those groups and showed that chimpanzees have unique traditions depending on where they live2. They identified at least 39 behaviours from a list of 65 that varied between groups for no obvious reason.

In humans, culture is passed on from one person to another, and in laboratory studies chimpanzees have shown the capacity to pass on learned customs. In one experiment, Whiten and his colleagues taught two chimps a complex series of steps for getting food from a box. Soon after the chimps were reunited with their groups, all the animals were using this method to get their food3. But whether such social learning happens in the wild is less clear. Gorillas and bonobos can also learn to use tools in the lab, but rarely use them in their natural habitat4.

Deciphering culture in the wild is difficult because researchers must ensure that behavioural differences between groups do not have other causes, such as variation in genetics or environmental conditions. "Why is it all chimps don't do everything? One solution is that there are hidden ecological differences between populations," says primatologist Richard Wrangham at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A behaviour could be linked to any number of variables such as amount of rainfall, the types of tree available, or the kinds of predator in the area, he says.

These influences can be subtle, as researchers found while studying how chimps use sticks to harvest army ants. Chimpanzees in Guinea sometimes use short sticks and sometimes use sticks up to twice as long. No reason for this was obvious until Tatyana Humle, an anthropologist at the University of Kent, UK, found that some ants are more aggressive, with longer legs and larger mandibles; they run up sticks quicker and bite harder5. This might explain why chimps elsewhere in Africa also choose tools of varying lengths to get at ants.

But researchers have not been able to find obvious explanations for other variations related to ant harvesting. Chimpanzees in Cote d'Ivoire sweep the ants off their sticks and into their palms before eating; in Guinea, only about 320 kilometres away, the animals stick the ant-laden sticks directly into their mouths. The same type of ant is present in both places.

Ruling out genetic influences is equally complicated. This year, molecular ecologist Kevin Langergraber at the EVA and his colleagues compared genetic and behavioural data for nine groups of chimpanzee. They found that communities with greater overlap in their mitochondrial DNA showed more similarities in their behaviour6. "What we are saying is, you haven't really ruled out the genetic explanation," says Langergraber.

There may be a few hundred thousand chimpanzees in Africa, but researchers have studied just 700–1,000 chimpanzees at the dozen sites with well habituated colonies, says Whiten. The available information from those groups is too little to determine how genes and the environment influence behavioural variations. Kühl compares the situation to using a handful of villages scattered around the world to draw basic conclusions about all the rituals that define human culture.

Whiten and his colleagues are now carrying out more detailed comparisons of the behaviour and ecology of chimps at all the habituated sites. But it has taken 50 years to capture the data they are using, most of which were recorded by painstaking observational studies.

The way forward may be the use of cameras hidden in strategic sites, like those Leinert and her team are setting up in Liberia. Such techniques have already proved their worth. Two years ago in Gabon, Boesch and his team were puzzled by random pits they observed in the ground. They set up camera traps and obtained video recordings of chimps digging to extract honey from underground bees' nests — something that had never been seen before7. "Camera traps are proving to be an exciting way to reveal new and often complex behavioural techniques in wild chimpanzee communities," says Whiten.
Caught in the act

At the site in Sapo, Leinert pulls on gloves to measure the rock used by the chimp to crack open nuts of the Guinea plum, Parinari excelsa. The rock is sizeable, weighing in at 880 grams. She collects nuts for later analysis, as well as hair and dung samples for genetic studies.

Leinert may later put up a video camera at the location to collect more data on the nut-cracking behaviour. The cameras are mounted in boxes on tree trunks at the height of a chimp's shoulder, and powered by rechargeable batteries. An infrared motion detector activates the camera for one minute when anything moves in its range.

Near the nut-cracking site, a solar-powered audio device is already continuously recording the forest sounds. Chimpanzees emit a range of calls, including short, high-pitched 'pant hoots' that are unique to each individual, and researchers can use them to identify individuals and to tally the size of a community. These calls may be a form of vocal culture, somewhat like human dialects8.

Over the next five years, the Pan Africa Great Ape Program will establish similar recording stations at locations across Africa. "So potentially we might have, in a few years, behavioural differences from 40 different populations, which is, as you know, four times more than what we have now," says Boesch.

Kühl proposes that these data could help in designing computer models to test how genes, ecology and social transmission influence the distribution and spread of behaviours such as nut cracking. One idea is that when female chimpanzees reach sexual maturity and move to new communities, they pass along their learned behaviours. Another possibility is that each group invents its own behaviours, some of which catch on and become a culture. Individual practices can die out in particular groups but thrive in others. Or, it might be that some chimp groups refuse to take up new ways of doing things from incoming individuals. This could explain why some populations show similar behaviours and others do not.

Before Kühl and his colleagues can conduct the modelling work, they need to devise a faster way to go through the recordings made by the camera and audio traps, which are accumulating at a rate of hundreds of hours each month. Students are currently carrying out the analysis but it can take 10 hours to go through an hour of video, according to Kühl. So engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, based in Ilmenau, Germany, have developed a computer algorithm to recognize individual chimpanzees from their facial patterns and distinctive features, such as the wrinkles under their eyes. In tests of zoo animals, the software can correctly identify individual chimpanzees 83% of the time, and it processes recordings ten times faster than a person can.

Nevertheless, the cameras cannot reveal how an adult chimp patrols its range, or other actions that play out over a wide area. The full portfolio of traditions in the community will remain a mystery. And automated recordings will never capture the subtle ecological information — such as the mandible size and leg length of army ants — that may eventually explain particular behaviours. These require boots on the ground, and long-term behavioural studies are needed to see how chimpanzees pass traditions on to each other as a driver of culture.

But already, the 30 cameras that Leinert has set up in Sapo Park have delivered some tantalizing clues. She is most interested in the lively young male she calls 'Janosch', whom she likes for "his big belly and the way he strikes out to crack the nuts". Besides being entertaining, he sometimes carries his pounding rock away with him, something Leinert hasn't seen with most other chimpanzees in Sapo. The practice may yet catch on with others there. If so, Leinert could be seeing the beginnings of a cultural variation, captured by the cameras she set up in the forest.

--
Box: How many chimpanzees are left?

Jacob the chimp, now two years old, spends most of his day in a wooden box not much bigger than himself. Born in Sapo National Park in Liberia, he was rescued by a forest ranger, who found Jacob and his dead mother in the arms of a poacher.

Such tales are common in Africa. Bushmeat is a vital source of protein and a dead chimpanzee can fetch US$200 in Nigeria. No one knows exactly how many chimps there are in the wild: in 2003, the International Union for Conservation of Nature made a very rough estimate of 172,700–299,700. But the population is declining rapidly, and many communities are likely to disappear in the next few decades. A study in 2008 found that the population in Côte d'Ivoire had decreased by 90% in 17 years.

In 2010, the dearth of data prompted the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, to team up with the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation, headquartered at the EVA, and Conservation International, based in Arlington, Virginia, to launch the Pan Africa Great Ape Program. They aim to conduct nationwide surveys in 15 countries to estimate how many chimps are left in Africa. The scientists involved would not disclose the project's budget, but acknowledged that the surveys will be expensive and that they do not yet have all the necessary funding.

As part of the survey, graduate student Jessica Junker of the EVA and her Liberian team of graduate students and rangers from the Forest Development Authority are walking some 400 kilometres to survey 68 squares laid out on a grid across the country. They trek through uncut bush and overgrown farms, across rivers, and into deep muddy valleys to look for chimpanzee nests. Each chimp usually builds a new nest every day, and the researchers can estimate the age of a nest from its state of decomposition. They can then extrapolate to get an idea of the number of animals in an area. Their findings so far suggest that Liberia holds at least 3,300 chimpanzees.

Using similar methods in Sierra Leone, the 2008–10 Tacugama National Chimpanzee Census estimated that more than 5,500 chimpanzees live in that country. This is much higher than a 1981 estimate of 2,500, probably because the earlier survey used less systematic survey methods.

Christophe Boesch of the EVA, who co-heads the Pan Africa Great Ape Program, says that it will guide conservation efforts to where they can do the most good. But getting precise numbers on the great apes in each country is expensive because of the labour involved, and some conservationists would rather see the money spent on enforcing laws against poaching.

“We don't need a nationwide survey to tell us we are losing the battle,” says David Greer, who coordinates the African Great Apes Program for the conservation group WWF. “We need to be more assertive, more aggressive with intervention measures, trying to stop the decline.”

Frans de Waal on the Colbert report

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Universality of language called into question, culture appears to drive underlying grammar of language families

From BBC
Language universality idea tested with biology method
By JASON PALMER
A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt.

A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families.

The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage.

The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development.

At the heart of both studies is a method based on what are known as phylogenetic studies.

Lead author Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, said the approach is akin to the study of pea plants by Gregor Mendel, which ultimately led to the idea of heritability of traits.

"By looking at variation amongst the descendant plants and knowing how they were related to each other, [Mendel] could work out the mechanisms that must govern that variation," Dr Dunn explained to BBC News.

"He inferred the existence of some kind of information transfer just from knowing family trees and observing variation, and that's exactly the same thing we're doing."

Family trees
Modern phylogenetics studies look at variations in animals that are known to be related, and from those can work out when specific structures evolved.

For their studies, the team studied the characteristics of word order in four language families: Indo-European, Uto-Aztec, Bantu and Austronesian.

They considered whether what we call prepositions occur before or after a noun ("in the boat" versus "the boat in") and how the word order of subject and object work out in either case ("I put the dog in the boat" versus "I the dog put the canoe in").

The method starts by making use of well-established linguistic data on words and grammar within these language families, and building "family trees" of those languages.

"Once we have those trees we look at distribution of these different word order features over the descendant languages, and build evolutionary models for what's most likely to produce the diversity that we observe in the world," Dr Dunn said.
Pea plants in a greenhouse The methods use inference in a similar way to Mendel's studies of pea plants

The models revealed that while different language structures in the family tree could be seen to evolve along the branches, just how and when they evolved depended on which branch they were on.

"We show that each of these language families evolves according to its own set of rules, not according to a universal set of rules," Dr Dunn explained.

"That is inconsistent with the dominant 'universality theories' of grammar; it suggests rather that language is part of not a specialised module distinct from the rest of cognition, but more part of broad human cognitive skills."

The paper asserts instead that "cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states".

However, co-author and evolutionary biologist Russell Gray of the University of Auckland stressed that the team was not pitting biology against culture in a mutually exclusive way.

"We're not saying that biology is irrelevant - of course it's not," Professor Gray told BBC News.

"But the clumsy argument about an innate structure of the human mind imposing these kind of 'universals' that we've seen in cognitive science for such a long time just isn't tenable."

Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, called the work "an important and welcome study".

However, Professor Pinker told BBC News that the finer details of the method need bearing out in order to more fully support their hypothesis that cultural boundaries drive the development of language more than biological limitations do.

"The [authors] suggest that the human mind has a tendency to generalise orderings across phrases of different types, which would not occur if the mind generated every phrase type with a unique and isolated rule.

"The tendency may be partial, and it may be elaborated in different ways in differently language families, but it needs an explanation in terms of the working of the mind of language speakers."

Reference
Dunn M, Greenhill SJ, Levinson SC, Gray RD (2011) Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature doi:10.1038/nature09923

Abstract
Languages vary widely but not without limit. The central goal of linguistics is to describe the diversity of human languages and explain the constraints on that diversity. Generative linguists following Chomsky have claimed that linguistic diversity must be constrained by innate parameters that are set as a child learns a language1, 2. In contrast, other linguists following Greenberg have claimed that there are statistical tendencies for co-occurrence of traits reflecting universal systems biases3, 4, 5, rather than absolute constraints or parametric variation. Here we use computational phylogenetic methods to address the nature of constraints on linguistic diversity in an evolutionary framework6. First, contrary to the generative account of parameter setting, we show that the evolution of only a few word-order features of languages are strongly correlated. Second, contrary to the Greenbergian generalizations, we show that most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specific rather than universal tendencies. These findings support the view that—at least with respect to word order—cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states.

blond capuchins use tools to gather termites

Critically endangered capuchins make tools to gather termites
by JEREMY HANCE
from mongabay.com

Less than 200 blond capuchins (Cebus falvius) survive in the highly-fragmented habitat of Brazil's Atlantic Forest. But this tiny group of monkeys, only rediscovered in 2006, is surprising scientists with its adept tool-using abilities. Displaying similar behavior to that which made the chimpanzees of Gombe famous worldwide, the blond capuchins modify sticks to gather termites from trees; however, according to the study published in Biology Letters the blond capuchins use two techniques never witnessed before: twisting the stick when inside the termite nest and tapping the nest before inserting the stick.

"Tapping the walls of the nest and rotating the stick have not been reported previously for chimpanzees or any other non-human primates. They indicate effective problem solving and effective deployment of sensitive manual actions," the study's authors write.

The technique of rotating the stick and tapping the nest add to the monkey's success according to researchers, who tested the monkeys' techniques for themselves.

"It really worked. The way they do it really enhanced their catch," lead author Antonio Souto of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil, told LiveScience. "I think they can do better than we did; they have more experience."

In addition, this is the first time capuchin monkeys have been observed using tools above the ground, since they raid termite nests on tree trunks.

First described by German naturalist George Marcgrave in 1664, the blond capuchin was formally named in 1774. But the blond capuchin disappeared for centuries, only to be re-discovered in 2006. The remaining populations is threatened by habitat loss, as well as hunting for food and as pets. Researchers estimate that 180 survive.

Reference
Souto A, Bione CBC, Bastos M, Bezerra BM, Fragaszy D, Schiel N (2011) Critically endangered blonde capuchins fish for termites and use new techniques to accomplish the task. Biology Letters. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.0034.

Abstract
We report the spontaneous modification and use of sticks to fish for termites, above the ground, in wild blonde capuchins (Cebus flavius). These critically endangered Neotropical primates inhabit remnants of the Atlantic Forest. They used two previously undescribed techniques to enhance their termite capture success: nest tapping and stick rotation. The current ecologically based explanation for tool use in wild capuchins (i.e. terrestrial habits and bipedalism) must be viewed cautiously. Instead, remarkable manual skills linked to a varied diet seem important in promoting tool use in different contexts. The repertoire of tool-using techniques employed by wild capuchins has been expanded, highlighting the behavioural versatility in this genus.

FAIL: Vending machine for crows erratum

From the NYtimes
thanks to Claudio T for the link! More info at Info Addict about the scam...

CORRECTION
Vending Machine for Crows
Published: April 12, 2009

An article in the Year in Ideas issue on Dec. 14, 2008, reported on Josh Klein, whose master’s thesis for New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program proposed “a vending machine for crows” that would enable the birds to exchange coins for peanuts. The article reported that beginning in June 2008, Klein tested the machine at the Binghamton Zoo, that the crows learned how to use it and that after a month the crows were actually scouring the ground for loose change.

The Times has since learned that Klein was never at the Binghamton Zoo, and there were no crows on display there in June 2008. He performed these experiments with captive crows in a Brooklyn apartment; he told the reporter about the Brooklyn crows but implied that his work with them was preliminary to the work at the zoo. Asked to explain these discrepancies, Klein now says he and the reporter had a misunderstanding about the zoo.

The reporter never called the zoo in Binghamton to confirm. And while the fact-checker did discuss the details with Klein, he did not call the zoo, as required under The Times’s fact-checking standards. In addition, the article said that Klein was working with graduate students at Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine, which does exist. Klein did get a professor at Binghamton to help him try it out twice in Ithaca, with assistance from a Binghamton graduate student, and it was not a success. Corvid experts who have since been interviewed have said that Klein’s machine is unlikely to work as intended.

These discrepancies were pointed out to The Times by the Binghamton professor several weeks after the article was published; this editors’ note was delayed for additional reporting. These details should have been discovered during the reporting and editing process. Had that happened, the article would not have been published.

---

original article:
Vending Machine for Crows
By CLAIRE TRAGESER

In June, Josh Klein revealed his master’s-thesis project to a flock of crows at the Binghamton Zoo in south-central New York State. The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he’d created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish. The Binghamton crows quickly learned that dropping nickels and dimes into the slot produced peanuts, and the most resourceful members of the flock began looking for more coins. Within a month, Klein had a flock of crows scouring the ground for loose change.

Now Klein is working with graduate students at Cornell University and Binghamton University to study how wild crows make use of his machine. Although his invention might conjure Hitchcock-worthy visions of crows stealing the loose change from pedestrians’ pockets and hands, Klein’s conception is more benign. To Klein, the machine demonstrates the value of cooperating with “synanthropes” — animals that have adapted seamlessly to human environments. “Rather than just killing off a species, why not see if they can do something useful for us, so we can all live in close proximity?” he said. To pursue his research, he founded the Synanthropy Foundation this year. Someday, he hopes, similar techniques may allow us to train rats to sort our garbage for us.

Genetic differentiation and the evolution of cooperation in chimpanzees and humans

Langergraber K, Schunert G, Rowney C, Wrangham R, Zommers Z, Vigilant L (2011) Genetic differentiation and the evolution of cooperation in chimpanzees and humans. Proceddings of the Royal Society Series B doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2592

Abstract
It has been proposed that human cooperation is unique among animals for its scale and complexity, its altruistic nature and its occurrence among large groups of individuals that are not closely related or are even strangers. One potential solution to this puzzle is that the unique aspects of human cooperation evolved as a result of high levels of lethal competition (i.e. warfare) between genetically differentiated groups. Although between-group migration would seem to make this scenario unlikely, the plausibility of the between-group competition model has recently been supported by analyses using estimates of genetic differentiation derived from contemporary human groups hypothesized to be representative of those that existed during the time period when human cooperation evolved. Here, we examine levels of between-group genetic differentiation in a large sample of contemporary human groups selected to overcome some of the problems with earlier estimates, and compare them with those of chimpanzees. We find that our estimates of between-group genetic differentiation in contemporary humans are lower than those used in previous tests, and not higher than those of chimpanzees. Because levels of between-group competition in contemporary humans and chimpanzees are also similar, these findings suggest that the identification of other factors that differ between chimpanzees and humans may be needed to provide a compelling explanation of why humans, but not chimpanzees, display the unique features of human cooperation.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

From youtube:
Bobby McFerrin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale, using audience participation, at the event "Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus", from the 2009 World Science Festival, June 12, 2009.

For related content, please view the full "Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus" program at their website:
http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/video/notes-neurons-full

From notes & neurons:
Is our response to music hard-wired or culturally determined? Is the reaction to rhythm and melody universal or influenced by environment? Join host John Schaefer, Jamshed Barucha, scientist Daniel Levitin, Professor Lawrence Parsons and musical artist Bobby McFerrin for live performances and cross cultural demonstrations to illustrate music’s note-worthy interaction with the brain and our emotions.

Social Learning in Dolphins - tail walking just for fun

From the Telegraph.co.uk
Dolphins 'walk' on water
Dolphins in the wild are teaching themselves to "walk" with their tails along the surface of water, biologists have claimed.

if above video doesnt work try this one on youtube

The mammals, which are celebrated for their playful natures, are developing the skill "just for fun", according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) in Australia. Dolphin tail-walking has no known practical function and has been likened to dancing in humans.

WDCS researcher Dr Mike Bossley, who has observed Adelaide's Port River dolphins for the past 24 years, said he had documented spectacular tail walking in two adult female dolphins, known as Billie and Wave. Now four other individuals have been recorded perfecting their walking techniques – Wave's calf Tallula, Bianca and her calf Hope, and calf Bubbles. Tail walking is very rare in the wild and in thousands of hours of observation only one other dolphin has ever been observed tail walking in the Port River, and then only once. The Port Adelaide dolphins are now said to be tail walking many times each day.

It is thought the mammals may have learned the remarkable skill from Billie – who spent a short period at a visitor attraction 22 years ago. Dr Bossley said that the spread of tail walking appeared to be motivated by "fun", but it was also linked to a serious and fascinating cultural aspect previously unseen in the species.

He said: "Culture in the wider sense of the term, defined as 'learned behaviour characteristic of a community', is now frequently on show in the Port River. This cultural behaviour is of great significance for conservation. "Cultural behaviours in animals have been identified in several species, particularly chimpanzees. However, most if not all the cultural behaviours described to-date have been of a utilitarian nature, mainly to do with obtaining food. "A well known chimpanzee example is using a twig to extract termites from a nest in the Gombe Stream reserve. "The only dolphin example seen up to now is in Shark Bay, West Australia, where a small group of dolphins habitually carry a sponge on the end of their jaw while fishing to protect them from fish spines.

"As far as we are aware, tail walking has no practical function and is performed just for fun – akin to human dancing or gymnastics. As such, it represents an internationally important example of the behavioural similarities between humans and dolphins."

Attention Men: Scientists identify moves that make men irresistible on the dancefloor

From the Guardian.co.uk
by IAN SAMPLE
Psychologists have used avatars to pinpoint the killer moves that can make men great dancers

The enduring mystery of why men rarely flatter themselves when they take to the dancefloor may finally have been solved. A team of psychologists used video footage of men strutting their stuff to pinpoint the killer moves that separate good dancers from bad. Men who were judged to be good dancers had a varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.

But the majority of men displayed highly repetitive moves that used their arms and legs, but not the rest of their bodies. "It's rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else," said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.

"Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it's not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That's a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That's a bad dancer too."

While features such as body shape and facial symmetry are well known indicators of healthy development, a person's dance moves may send out more subtle clues about their potential as a mate, Neave said.

Neave's team recruited 19 male volunteers aged between 18 and 35 and asked them to dance to a simple drum beat in front of a video camera for 30 seconds. To capture the dance moves, 38 infra-red reflectors were attached to their clothing. These produce bright spots that allow the movement of every limb and joint to be tracked and studied in detail. The researchers used software to transfer each man's dance routine to an avatar on a computer screen. This ensured that the judges ranked the dancers according to their moves and not their height, looks or other physical features.

The dancers were judged by 37 straight women, also aged 18 to 35, who watched the avatar perform 15 seconds of each man's routine before ranking them on a scale of one to seven, where one was very bad dancing.

"The head, neck and upper body come out as the key features that are important for good dancing and that surprised us," said Neave, whose study is published in the journal Biology Letters. "When you see brilliant dancers, you'll see their bodies, heads and necks are all doing ever so slightly different things in time to the music."

Will Brown, a psychologist at the University of East London, said more work was needed to disentangle why dancing is attractive and its biological significance. "When you have so much movement data from a relatively small sample of dancers, you might get chance associations between certain moves and dance attractiveness," he said. "Flexing the trunk while dancing may be attractive, but we need to show it is indicative of a better quality male using an independent measure of biological quality."

Neave said his group is working through the results of blood tests on the men, which appear to show that the better dancers are healthier.

Chimps seek out and de-arm snares in Bossou, Guinea

"Waller" lost his hand after it was trapped in a snare, Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda.
Picture courtesy of Kevin Langergraber.

From the BBC (thanks to Cleve H and Dieter L for the link!)
Wild chimps outwit human hunters
By MATT WALKER

Wild chimpanzees are learning how to outwit human hunters. Across Africa, people often lay snare traps to catch bushmeat, killing or injuring chimps and other wildlife. But a few chimps living in the rainforests of Guinea have learnt to recognise these snare traps laid by human hunters, researchers have found. More astonishing, the chimps actively seek out and intentionally deactivate the traps, setting them off without being harmed. The discovery was serendipitously made by primatologists Mr Gaku Ohashi and Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa who were following chimps living in Bossou, Guinea to study the apes' social behaviour.

Snare injuries to chimps are reported at many sites across east and west Africa where chimps are studied, with many animals dying in the traps. However, very few snares injuries have been reported among chimps studied at Bossou, which is unusual as the chimps live close to human settlements and snares are commonly laid in the area.

Now primatologists know why.

While researching the chimps, Mr Ohashi and Prof Matsuzawa, of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan, observed five male chimps, both juvenile and adult, attempting to break and deactivate snares. On two occasions witnessed, the chimps successfully deactivated the traps set for them.

Wire noose
A typical snare, for example one made by the Manon people of Bossou, consists of a loop of iron wire connected by a vine rope to an arched stick, often a sapling. The sapling puts tension into the rope and once an animal passes through the wire loop, the trap is sprung and the sapling pulls it tight, around the neck or leg of an animal. Such traps cause indiscriminate damage, ensnaring any and all animals that come into contact with them.

But male Bossou chimps have worked out how to outwit the hunters and deactivate the traps. "They seemed to know which parts of the snares are dangerous and which are not," Mr Ohashi told the BBC.

In the journal Primates, the researchers describe six separate cases where chimps were observed trying to deactivate snares. Mostly, the chimps grasped the snare stick with their hands, shaking it violently until the trap broke. Sometimes a chimp lightly knocked the sapling that holds the snare, before grasping it to break the trap. But in all cases, they avoided touching the dangerous part, the wire loop.

Life-saving skills
"We were surprised when we found this behaviour," says Mr Ohashi. "This is the first report of chimpanzees breaking snares without injury." The chimps' actions may also reveal something important about how chimps learn. Often, chimps acquire new talents by trial and error. For example, when trying to crack nuts, they might strike one stone onto an anvil stone and miss the nuts all together. Or they might use their hands to strike the nut, which is ineffective. But the Bossou chips couldn't have learned how to deactivate the snares this way, as one mistake could be fatal. "The observations indicate that chimpanzees can learn some manners without trial and error," says Mr Ohashi.

The researchers speculate that the chimps may have learnt how the snares work by observing them over time, and this information has been passed down generations. During one case, a juvenile male watched an adult male deactivate a snare, before then moving in to handle it once it was safe.

The researchers caution that snares remain a significant threat to wild chimps, and they are leading conservation efforts to scan the forest for the traps and remove them. They also say that chimps in other regions do not appear so far to have also learnt how to outwit human hunters in this way.

--
Reference:
Ohashi G and Matsuzawa T (2010) Deactivation of snares by wild chimpanzees. Primates
DOI: 10.1007/s10329-010-0212-8

Abstract
Snare injuries to chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have been reported at many study sites across Africa, and in some cases cause the death of the ensnared animal. However, very few snare injuries have been reported concerning the chimpanzees of Bossou, Guinea. The rarity of snare injuries in this study group warrants further consideration, given the exceptionally close proximity of the Bossou chimpanzees to human settlements and the widespread practice of snare hunting in the area. Herein we report a total of six observations of chimpanzees attempting to break and deactivate snares, successfully doing so on two of these occasions. We observed the behavior in 5 males, ranging in age from juveniles to adults. We argue that such active responses to snares must be contributing to the rarity of injuries in this group. Based on our observations, we suggest that the behavior has transmitted down the group. Our research team at Bossou continues to remove snares from the forest, but the threat of ensnarement still remains. We discuss potential ways to achieve a good balance between human subsistence activities and the conservation of chimpanzees at Bossou, which will increasingly be an area of great concern in the future.

chimpanzee culture: now featuring back scratchers

From livescience.com
Cultured Chimps Invent and Share Back-Scratching Tool
By CHARLES Q CHOI

By learning an utterly superfluous technique for scratching their backs, wild chimpanzees are displaying even more evidence that humanity's closest living relatives are capable of what might be deemed culture.

In recent years, researchers have accumulated many examples of chimpanzees apparently learning relatively complex ideas that get passed down over generations much like in human cultures. For instance, chimps in the wild have developed a variety of specialized tool kits for foraging army ants that differ across regions.

Still, not all scientists are convinced the apes can learn practices by mimicking their companions, at least not in the wild. Instead, one could argue that generations of chimps might either instinctively know or independently figure out techniques for accomplishing certain tasks, a process that might resemble the learning by imitation seen in humans.

The new evidence that chimpanzees are indeed capable of "monkey see, monkey do" came from the Sonso chimp community in Uganda.

"I would sometimes spend days trying to find the chimps and then they might travel through everything from muddy swamps and thick undergrowth to colonies of army ants before there'd be a good chance to film them," said researcher Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "But then, when you do get to observe them in their natural habitat, it's an incredibly rewarding experience, and you completely forget about the fact you're sitting in the mud with ants in your socks!"

One chimpanzee there was named Tinka, a roughly 50-year-old male who had near-total paralysis in both hands. Until recently, Sonso chimpanzees would encounter large numbers of snares intended for bush pigs and kinds of antelopes known as duiker, leading one-in-three adult chimps in the community to have permanent disabilities.

To compensate for his paralysis, Tinka invented a new way to groom himself using a liana, or woody vine. Imagine using a towel on your back, except in this case, rather than moving the towel, Tinka held the liana taut with his feet and moved his body against it. [Watch video of Tinka using his invention.]

"It's always sad to see chimpanzees with these debilitating injuries," Hobaiter said. "On the other hand, it was incredible to see just how individuals such as Tinka were able to innovate new techniques in order to overcome these disadvantages."

Other chimps follow suit
Scientists then video-recorded seven perfectly healthy, able-bodied wild young chimps ages 4 to 13 who shared Tinka's home range. The videos revealed the chimpanzees mimicking Tinka's backscratching technique, even though they could just as readily have groomed themselves with their hands, as chimpanzees normally do. This suggested the apes learned this novel, distinct practice through imitation.

"Copying behavior that has no function is one of the classic characteristics of human imitation," Hobaiter said. "To see that in wild chimps was incredibly exciting."

The capability to imitate an organized sequence of action was something that had been argued to be a uniquely human trait.

"The fact that we are able to show that wild chimpanzees have the ability to learn new behavioral routines through imitation is not only relevant to how they might be able to acquire complex technical skills such as food processing, for example nut-cracking, but it also suggests that this cognitive capacity evolved earlier than previously supposed -- at least as far back as our last common ancestor," Hobaiter told LiveScience.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 5 in the journal PLoS ONE.

--
Reference
Hobaiter C, Byrne RW (2010) Able-Bodied Wild Chimpanzees Imitate a Motor Procedure Used by a Disabled Individual to Overcome Handicap. PLoS ONE 5(8): e11959. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011959

Abstract
Chimpanzee culture has generated intense recent interest, fueled by the technical complexity of chimpanzee tool-using traditions; yet it is seriously doubted whether chimpanzees are able to learn motor procedures by imitation under natural conditions. Here we take advantage of an unusual chimpanzee population as a ‘natural experiment’ to identify evidence for imitative learning of this kind in wild chimpanzees. The Sonso chimpanzee community has suffered from high levels of snare injury and now has several manually disabled members. Adult male Tinka, with near-total paralysis of both hands, compensates inability to scratch his back manually by employing a distinctive technique of holding a growing liana taut while making side-to-side body movements against it. We found that seven able-bodied young chimpanzees also used this ‘liana-scratch’ technique, although they had no need to. The distribution of the liana-scratch technique was statistically associated with individuals' range overlap with Tinka and the extent of time they spent in parties with him, confirming that the technique is acquired by social learning. The motivation for able-bodied chimpanzees copying his variant is unknown, but the fact that they do is evidence that the imitative learning of motor procedures from others is a natural trait of wild chimpanzees.

New study broadens debate on human and chimpanzee culture

From Sciencemag.org
Are Some Chimp 'Cultural' Behaviors Actually in the Genes?
BY JOHN COHEN

Thirty-five years ago, researchers studying chimpanzees in the wild noticed that neighboring communities had distinct grooming behaviors that could not be explained by differences in their environments. They contended that these behavioral idiosyncrasies were learned, or "cultural," and other scientists soon began noting group-specific tool uses and courting behaviors that also didn't appear to be environmental. But in a new study, researchers say some of these behaviors may be genetic after all.

Before that 1975 revelation, few researchers had observed different communities of wild chimpanzees, and no one had even recognized that these behavioral differences existed. Investigators have been arguing about whether chimps truly have culture ever since. Proponents of culture published a landmark Nature paper in 1999 documenting 39 behaviors that were frequently observed in some communities and never seen in others. In the article's wake, a flood of reports began to appear about culture in other species, and the debates roiled on, with endless discussions about the meaning of the word itself.

The new study, published online tomorrow in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, examines partial sequences of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from wild chimpanzees in nine different groups. This DNA is handy because it's inherited only from mothers, and only chimp females typically move to new communities. Team members examined the links between the groups and 38 of the 39 supposed cultural variants documented in the earlier report. The study does not link behaviors to specific genes or even conclude that there is a genetic explanation. Rather, it assesses whether genetic differences can be excluded as an explanation for each behavior; it finds that they cannot more than half the time.

This distinction may seem subtle, but the idea of animal culture turns on the requirement of first excluding ecological forces as an explanation for behaviors. The study now adds yet another hurdle to clear before making bold claims about culture. "I have no horse in this race," says lead author Kevin Langergraber, a molecular ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "I saw some studies that claimed they were settling this question, and I had gathered data that spoke to quite a different explanation."

The findings, as might be expected in this controversial field, are receiving a mixed reaction. The first author of the 1999 Nature study, evolutionary psychologist Andrew Whiten of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom—who did not contribute to the new study—says Langergraber and colleagues have done "a very careful and rigorous job." But Whiten contends that they have given too much weight to the "the relationships between behavioral and genetic differences they found." Specifically, he contends that the sequencing of small regions of mtDNA as well as the relatively few documented behavioral differences are "very crude overall measures" of the true genetic and behavioral differences. He further singles out several experiments that he and others have conducted with unrelated captive chimpanzees that clearly demonstrate sophisticated social learning skills, especially for tool use. "Given all we know about chimpanzee social and individual learning, it seems unlikely that there are any chimpanzees that, because of their genetic constitution, cannot observationally learn all the kinds of tool use seen in Africa."

Ethologist Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta has a more generous take on the new work. In 1999 de Waal wrote an accompanying editorial in Nature that said Whiten and colleagues had provided a "record so impressive that it will be hard to keep these apes out of the cultural domain." The new work, de Waal contends, "is not dismissive of the culture concept, but adds a complication to the picture."

De Waal notes that individuals of a species often have similar behaviors that are not controlled by genes. "No one would assume a gene for ant fishing in the chimpanzee in the same way that no one would assume that some humans have a knife-and-fork gene and others a chopstick gene," says de Waal. Still, he says the new findings likely will make the nature vs. nurture discussion more interesting. "If we simply accept that chimpanzees have cultural habits that spread by means of social learning and then add this genetic picture to it, we get in fact a view closer to what we know about humans, and a broader debate that we have hardly had before," says de Waal.

Langergraber, who studies the evolution of cooperation and social relationships in wild chimpanzees, notes that there's compelling evidence in finches, crows, and gorillas that some behaviors—like learning to use tools or eat nettles that will sting unless they are handled just so—have genetic underpinnings. And the same is true of humans, he notes. "Some things you'd never think are genetically determined are highly inheritable. Genes, for example, appear to play a role in whether a person is an extrovert who wears loud clothing or an introvert who dresses for comfort.

But he stresses that in wild chimpanzees, especially since females often migrate to different communities, it will be particularly difficult to sort the genetic from the cultural. "They're not moving only their genes, but it could be behavior as well," says Langergraber. "So you could get a positive correlation between genetic and behavioral similarity even if it were 100% cultural." Langergraber says he'd make a more conservative point, "You can't rule out that it's genetic."

Thanks to Claudio T for the link
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Reference
Langergraber KE, Boesch C, Inoue E, Inoue-Murayama M, Matani J, Nishida T, Pusey A, Reynolds V, Schubert G, Wrangham R, Wroblewski E, Vigilant L (2010) Genetic and ‘cultural’ similarity in wild chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1112

ABSTRACT
The question of whether animals possess ‘cultures’ or ‘traditions’ continues to generate widespread theoretical and empirical interest. Studies of wild chimpanzees have featured prominently in this discussion, as the dominant approach used to identify culture in wild animals was first applied to them. This procedure, the ‘method of exclusion,’ begins by documenting behavioural differences between groups and then infers the existence of culture by eliminating ecological explanations for their occurrence. The validity of this approach has been questioned because genetic differences between groups have not explicitly been ruled out as a factor contributing to between-group differences in behaviour. Here we investigate this issue directly by analysing genetic and behavioural data from nine groups of wild chimpanzees. We find that the overall levels of genetic and behavioural dissimilarity between groups are highly and statistically significantly correlated. Additional analyses show that only a very small number of behaviours vary between genetically similar groups, and that there is no obvious pattern as to which classes of behaviours (e.g. tool-use versus communicative) have a distribution that matches patterns of between-group genetic dissimilarity. These results indicate that genetic dissimilarity cannot be eliminated as playing a major role in generating group differences in chimpanzee behaviour.

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More press can be found at:

• New Scientist - The genetical evolution of chimp culture
• Discover Magazine - The genetic side to chimpanzee culture
• Welt Online - Schimpansen gucken doch nicht ab (in German)