An international team of researchers led by Ammie Kalan and Hjalmar Kühl of the Pan African Programme: the Cultured Chimpanzee (PanAf) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology compiled a data set combining fieldwork conducted by the PanAf at 46 field sites, plus an in-depth literature search on chimpanzee research. For 144 chimpanzee social groups they investigated the long-standing question of under which environmental conditions chimpanzees acquire more behavioural traits. They used their unique dataset to test whether chimpanzee groups were more likely to possess a larger set of behaviours if they lived in more seasonal habitats or habitats where forest cover repeatedly changed over the last thousands of years. The behaviours largely included tool use and more than half have been described as cultural in previous studies.
citation:
Kalan AK, Kulik L, Arandjelovic M, Boesch C, Haas F, Dieguez P, Barratt CD, Abwe EE, Agbor A, Angedakin S, Aubert F, Ayimisin EA, Bailey E, Bessone M, Brazzola G, Buh VE, Chancellor R, Cohen H, Coupland C, Curran B, Danquah E, Deschner T, Dowd D, Eno-Nku M, Fay JM, Goedmakers A, Granjon AC, Head J, Hedwig D, Hermans V, Jeffery KJ, Jones S, Junker J, Kadam P, Kambi M, Kienast I, Kujirakwinja D, Langergraber KE, Lapuente J, Larson B, Lee KC, Leinert V, Llana M, Marrocoli S, Meier AC, Morgan B, Morgan D, Neil E, Nicholl S, Normand E, Ormsby LJ, Pacheco L, Piel A, Preece J, Robbins MM, Rundus A, Sanz C, Sommer V, Stewart F, Tagg N, Tennie C, Vergnes V, Welsh A, Wessling EG, Willie J, Wittig RM, Yuh YG, Zuberbuehler K, Kühl HS (2020) Environmental variability supports chimpanzee behavioural diversity. Nature Communications 11 (4451) doi: 0.1038/s41467-020-18176-3
