The Spread of Culture, Primitive as It Is

摘要

It wasn't until 35 years ago that chimp researchers from Gombe visited the nearby project in the Mahale Mountains and noticed a startling difference in grooming techniques. This led to the idea that chimpanzee communities had unique "cultures," but field studies have had difficulty proving that chimps transmit social behaviors. So in 2003, with a freshly minted Ph.D. in hand from the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, Victoria Horner came to Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University to exploit its unique culture: Its 47-hectare field station in this Atlanta suburb houses two groups of chimps that live in separate but nearly identical conditions, an ideal experimental setting to study transmission of culture in a controlled environment. "There's no other facility in the world like this," says Homer, who works here with Frans de Waal of Emory.