Orangutans May Pass Their Culture to Offspring

A new study provides evidence of what anthropologists have been suspecting for a long time, and namely the fact that orangutans have the ability to learn socially. Furthermore, the species is capable of passing down this information from one generation to the next.

Most great apes exhibit signs of culture, researchers say, as do humans. Given the similarities between our species and these creatures, it makes sense to assume that our culture shares a common evolutionary root with their own.

Social learning is a highly-specialized trait that allows the passing down of behavioral innovations from parents to children and so on. It appeared in order for species to avoid having to evolve on the same path during each generation.

This trait is tightly linked to the development of culture. This is especially visible in humans, and many experts believed that this was one of the main traits separating us from animals until not long ago.

But experts discovered geographical variations in the behaviors of great ape species some 10 years ago. The finding raised a very interesting question – are these differences caused by cultural development or by genetic/environmental factors?

In an attempt to answer this important question, Swiss experts at the University of Zürich conducted a new research on 9 orangutan populations living in Borneo and Sumatra. The team concluded that it is entirely possible that cultural transmission underlies the geographic variations in behavioral patterns.

The study covered more than 150 animals, and included more than 100,000 hours of observations. The latter covered mostly behavioral data, which investigators followed closely. The team also create genetic profiles for the orangutans, Wired reports.

Satellite imagery and remote sensing techniques were also used to analyze the ecological differences that developed between the habitats the nine different populations were living in. Details of the new study appear in the latest issue of the scientific journal Current Biology.

“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,” explains researcher Carel van Schaik, a coauthor of the investigation.

“The cultural interpretation of the behavioral diversity also holds for orangutans – and in exactly the same way as we would expect for human culture,” explains the first author of the study, expert Michael Krützen.

“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,” he concludes.