Do chimpanzees have culture? What termite fishing and handclasps show

Many researchers now say yes, in a limited sense, though the word is still contested. Animal culture is defined as the ability of non-human animals to learn and transmit behaviours through social or cultural learning. Even so, whether to call it culture has been a contentious subject, sometimes forcing researchers to rethink what it is to be human.

The story starts with Jane Goodall, who began studying the chimpanzees of the Kasakela community at Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania, in 1960. Her work challenged two long-standing beliefs: that only humans could make and use tools, and that chimpanzees were vegetarians. At a termite mound she watched a chimpanzee push stalks of grass into termite holes and pull them out covered with clinging termites, effectively fishing for termites. Louis Leakey wrote that we must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.

Culture, though, is more than a single clever trick. It means a behaviour that spreads by social learning and differs from group to group. In the late 1970s researchers found a social-grooming handclasp that was common in one troop of chimpanzees in Tanzania but absent in nearby groups. It seems to make grooming armpits easier, but it actually has no apparent advantage, which makes it hard to explain as a survival tool.

That matters because opponents of animal culture had argued that such behaviours had simply evolved because they mattered for survival. A habit with no payoff, shared by one group and not the next, looks more like a custom.