Like Humans, Baboons Have Cumulative Culture and Collect Knowledge Over Generations

One of the things that separates humans from animals is culture--the ability to build up knowledge over generations. Now, esearchers have found that humans aren't the only ones that possess this ability. It turns out that baboons are also capable of cumulative culture.

Humankind is partly capable of its great accomplishments due to cumulative culture. Humans learn from their elders and enrich their knowledge from generation to generation. In contrast, while animals like chimpanzees can learn things from their peers, each individual seems to be starting from scratch.

It seems that baboons, though, also possess the same ability as humans. Scientists watched baboons living in groups that had free access to an area with touch screens. There, they could play a "memory game" specifically designed for the study. The screen briefly displayed a grid of 16 squares, four of which were red and the others white. The image was then replaced by a similar grid, but composed of only white squares. The baboons had to touch the four squares that were previously red in order to "win."

In the second phase, information was transmitted from one individual to another. A baboon's response was used to generate the next grid pattern that the following baboon had to memorize and reproduce, and so on for 12 "generations."

So what did they find? It turns out that the baboons performed better in the phase involving a transmission chain, compared with random testing. In fact, the success rate increased from 80 to over 95 percent. What surprised the researchers most that the findings seemed to indicate that, like humans, baboons have the ability to transmit and accumulate changes over "cultural generations."

The findings reveal that humans aren't the only ones that can transmit information from generation to generation. That said, scientists are no curious as to why no examples of this type of cultural evolution have been clearly identified in the wild. For now, they believe it's possible because the ultilitarian dimension of non-human primate culture hinders such evolution.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.