Like Humans, Other Primates Have Fashion-Trend Setters, TooResearch shows that chimps can jump arbitrarily on fashion bandwagons
The Wall Street Journal
By Robert M. Sapolsky March 11, 2015 10:27 a.m. ET
Julie, the inventor of the grass-in-ear behavior, which would later spread to almost all group members, at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust, Zambia. Photo: Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage TrustWe expect words like “culture” and “technology” to appear in history textbooks or sociology articles, in newspapers or Silicon Valley prospectuses. But those words also appear regularly in animal-behavior journals—and, increasingly, in ways that would be familiar to humans who read fashion magazines and follow fads.
The “culture” concept got jump-started in primatology in the 1940s, with reports of an all-time primate genius, a Japanese macaque monkey named Imo. Her troop lived near a beach frequented by tourists who fed them, and she invented a technique for washing and salting potatoes by dipping them into seawater. Then, not resting on her laurels, Imo had another breakthrough. Tourists would toss the monkeys grains of wheat that would get mixed with sand. Imo figured out that if she threw a handful of the mixture into the water, the sand would sink and the wheat would float—and she could then collect the wheat.
Where does “culture” fit into Imo’s biography? Her techniques spread to friends and relatives, continuing in the group for years. By the classic definition of social anthropology, this constituted cultural transmission.
Meanwhile, nonhuman primates burst onto the technology scene with Jane Goodall’s observation in 1960 that Tanzanian chimps make tools—sticks modified for fishing tasty termites out of mounds. Subsequent research showed tool use among chimps across Africa: rock hammers and anvils for cracking nuts, clumped-up leaves for sopping up water from tree hollows, sticks sharpened for hunting.
Different populations make different tools. New techniques spread across social networks (i.e., among chimps who hang out with each other). Youngsters pick up techniques by watching their mothers (with daughters learning faster than sons, as the latter mess around and don’t pay attention). Techniques spread from one group to another when someone emigrates.
Remarkably, chimps display something else: conformity. Everyone does something the same way; then someone stumbles on an equally effective alternative. That individual marches to a different drummer for a while before dropping the invention and rejoining the technology herd.
So what’s new in chimp-culture studies? The transmission of “arbitrary” behaviors. If there are two ways of doing something, one, arbitrarily favored by an influential group member, becomes the norm. Or teach a chimp an arbitrary sequence of actions and reward the chimp for them, and the behavior spreads.
Reporting recently in the journal Animal Cognition, Edwin van Leeuwen of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and colleagues saw something irresistibly nutty in a 12-chimp group in Zambia. Back in 2007, a female named Julie got it into her head to start walking around with a long, strawlike blade of grass in her ear.
The behavior had no discernible function, and no other chimp had ever been observed to do the “grass-in-ear-behavior” (what the authors call GIEB). Could she be trying to ease the irritation of a parasite or infectious disease? The researchers ruled that out, because neighboring chimp groups weren’t suffering from ear problems, making it unlikely that Julie was afflicted.
Julie just liked having a piece of grass sticking out of her ear. So sue her.
The behavior caught on. Chimps soon went about their business with grass stuck in their ears. Julie remained the queen of GIEB-ing. During the five-year study period, the other group members GIEB-ed from one to 36 times, whereas Julie clocked in with an untouchable 168 times. Eventually, two-thirds of Julie’s group GIEB-ed. The behavior continued even after her death in 2012—the gold standard of cultural transmission.
What is this about? Again, as far as our era’s finest minds can tell, GIEB-ing is good for nothing. It doesn’t get you food or defend you from predators. It’s a fad, like the human version. Individuals invent spiky blue hair or embed a permanent ink pattern in their skin or hang hoops from their ears (or from their noses, in another culture). Everyone decides that looks cool. And starts GIEB-ing.
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