14 DAY TRIAL // Chimpanzees have over the years been associated and compared with humans both in terms of appearance and mental prowess, but a growing sentiment among academics has it that the primates will never be able to actually invent things. This trait, which involves high abstractionism skills and planning ahead, seems to be reserved entirely for the human race. Apparently, chimps have the ability to use crude tools, but they are not developed by single individuals living isolated (proof of ingenuity), but by members of a pack learning from each other.
“For culture to accumulate – to become more and more complex – requires innovations and one of the first ways in which hominins clearly went beyond chimpanzees was in making stone tools,” explains St. Andrew's University expert Andrew Whiten, quoted by NewScientist. He, alongside other researchers, believes that the main difference between us and primates like chimpanzees is the very way in which we learn from each other, and from the past. The modern school system should never be considered a joke after reading this.
A team of experts from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, including anthropologists Claudio Tennie and Michael Tomasello, believe that the chimps that learn various tricks from their “peers” do not necessarily focus their attention on the actions that led to a certain result, but rather in the result itself – a cracked nut, a fish caught, or an insect snack. Conversely, in humans, we tend to memorize all the gestures that lead to a certain action, alongside the end result. For example, when learning to wield a hammer, the way in which the tool is held is always observed and repeated carefully.
Essentially, what keeps chimps back is their inability to create a process on their own. They can reach a certain result, but they can never understand why the outcome came to be. The same type of behavior can be seen in people who know the answer to a mathematical problem, but fail to describe and understand the set of equations that led to that particular result. In chimps, most youngsters learn sets of movements from their parents, and repeat them throughout their entire life span, but never understand why those moves are the best for the job.