Essay On Chimpanzee Culture

For a long time, humans have been the only ones to be regarded as having culture. Within human culture, there exist many diverse culture since each community and place there are different people and practices that they have. For example, Secret Santa, an event where friends or people within a community exchange gifts however, does not reveal who gave the gift. That type of event or gift exchange does not include in some other communities so that gradually becomes a type of culture within a certain group. Since there is evidence that chimpanzees could have been human’s ancestors or related to human ancestors, anthropologists over the past years have started studying whether culture exists within the chimpanzees’ communities. Anthropologists …show more content…
In another article written by Whiten and his studies group “Cultures in Chimpanzees”, Whiten does another research to see whether some cultural aspect in chimp communities are practiced through social contact and in this specific research Whiten and his study groups include social behavior within the chimp groups other than focusing on just tool use. Whiten and his studies group concluded in this research that “our data agree with experimental studies thathaveshownthatchimpanzeescopy themethodsusedbyothers to manipulate and open artificial ‘fruits’ designed as analogues of wild foods” (Whiten et al. 685). Whiten and his group concludes that chimps does not have a teaching system like humans but, chimps just copy and learn what other chimps do through social interactions. In addition, Whiten also observed with his group that the social behavior within the chimp groups are also acquired through imitation for example chimps scratching each other’s backs. So it can be concluded from this article that chimps acquire their culture socially but, whenever a new social behavior or tool is developed chimpsstart to copy or imitate each other and thus a new culture is “invented” to help advance with the “old