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Community Resources for Learning: How Capuchin Monkeys Construct Technical Traditions

  • Thematic Issue Article: Cultural Niche Construction
  • Published:
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Abstract

The developmental importance to humans of the human-constructed physical environment, including myriad modified natural objects or manufactured objects, is well recognized. The importance of the physical dimension of the constructed niche has also been recognized in nonhuman animals with respect to dwellings (e.g., beavers’ dams, birds’ nests, and bees’ hives), but has not previously been applied to technical traditions, despite the fact that enduring alterations of the physical environment left by social partners are part of the constructed niche that supports the learning of technical skills through the phenomenon of delayed social facilitation. These alterations aid learning over a longer time scale than the actions themselves. Thus, technical skills that result in enduring physical artifacts, which themselves aid learning the skills, should be both more persistent in a population and more widespread than technical skills that do not share this feature. This perspective gives us a new lens through which to understand the origins of technical traditions in nonhuman animals, and by extension, in human ancestors. Understanding the process by which traditional technical skills are acquired in nonhuman species gives us insight into the ways that the combination of social and physical niche construction can support the evolution of technical aspects of culture from modest beginnings.

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Notes

  1. Recent molecular analysis has revealed that capuchin monkeys, formerly identified as the single genus Cebus, are two genera, with the robust forms, including C. libidinosus, C. xanthosternos, and several other species, now recognized as the genus Sapajus and the gracile forms retained as the genus Cebus (Lynch-Alfaro et al. 2011, 2012). To date, tool use has been observed in some species of wild Sapajus but in no species of wild Cebus. We retain the genus designation of Cebus for published works cited here that used that designation.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Kevin Laland and Mike O’Brien for the invitation to participate in the KLI workshop. I thank my fellow participants at that conference for thought-provoking discussions that widened my understanding of niche construction. Thanks to Tatyana Humle for sharing unpublished data and to Noelle Gunst, Yonat Eshchar, and Jessi Crast for their research contributions and assistance with figures. Thanks also to Elisabetta Visalberghi, Sue Boinski, and Patricia Izar for many years of fruitful conversations about capuchins and the research collaborations reported here. My research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0352035), the National Geographic Society Committee on Research and Exploration, the Leakey Foundation, and the University of Georgia.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Dorothy M. Fragaszy

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Correspondence to Dorothy M. Fragaszy.

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Fragaszy, D.M. Community Resources for Learning: How Capuchin Monkeys Construct Technical Traditions. Biol Theory 6, 231–240 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-012-0032-8

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