Chimps Did Not Evolve Like Humans

Why did the Chimps Not Evolve like Humans?

Chimps are very intelligent animals. They have the ability to learn a lot from the environment and therefore they can also pass on much to their descendants. New methods of cracking nuts have always been passed on to their newer generations; however, they do not look interested in learning anymore.

The culture of humans is very diverse and is notified with differences in their social customs, religions, dresses and much more. Chimpanzees, being the closest creatures to humans, also differ from colony to colony; but their cultures and norms are not as complex as of the humans.

A recent study suggests the reasons as to why chimps are not as motivated to learn much from one another.It basically shows a certain species readiness to incorporate social information and learning into one’s own repertoire. The study conducted in Netherlands looks closely into the living patterns of the chimpanzees.

These creatures live in small groups around other chimpanzee tribes. The different tribes follow different and at times unique cultural practices. For example, one of the studies conducted in Tai National Park in Ivory Coast concluded that the three chimpanzee tribes that they were studying, all had different methods of cracking nuts.

These groups did intermingle and breed among each other though, which means that the learning was not genetic. Rather, their descendants were able to learn those things socially. Even if we don’t consider the different methods of nut-cracking very astonishing, we do consider different languages, social mores, religions and other such cultural factors very interesting. We still don’t know why humans have the ability to splinter so much from one another. Chimpanzees do have the ability to learn socially and imitate the one another; at the same time, they are not even conservative as compared to humans. However, they haven’t been able to evolve as much as humans have.

Edwin Van Leeuwen, the doctoral student at Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics put 23 German preschoolers and 14 chimpanzees through identical experiments and concluded that the difference between humans and chimpanzees is not in their capability, but it is actually in the motivation. The study involved putting three cups on the table in front of every subject. A reward (toy or treat was hidden under one of the three cups).

The subjects were allowed to pick up only one cup. The children would in some cases, watch the other children pick up a cup before they made an attempt; similarly, the chimpanzees also got such chances.

The results showed that the chimpanzees and the children both preferred to trust their own experience to that of their peers. However, the human children were more prone to influence fromothers’ decisions as compared to the chimpanzees. Meanwhile the chimpanzees would pick up random cups, the human children would likely look under the same location where they saw another kid score a treat. This suggested that the chimpanzees were less motivated to look for social information as compared to the humans. They just weren’t interested to learn from the others.

Related Article: http://www.researchomatic.com/New-Research/Shared-Trait-Between-Humans-and-Chimpanzees-258893.html