During the last decades, zoologists have discovered this ability in other species, especially cetaceans and primates, such as chimpanzees. These, for example, have developed a wide variety of tools , from sticks used to wade rivers to sticks with which they extract honey from hives.
Now, a team of researchers from the universities of Cambridge, Kyoto and Free Berlin has observed that this type of cultural manifestation varies between different groups of chimpanzees, even when it comes to neighboring and even related populations. To determine this, Kathelijne Koops, from the Department of Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, who has coordinated the study, and her collaborators compared the tools that these apes use to remove the ants they feed on from the nests they build in the Kalinzu forest, Uganda.
Scientists already knew from previous work that chimpanzees use longer or shorter sticks depending on the type of ant they intend to capture. However, the two communities they examined chose to use different rods despite the fact that there were no ecological variations between the two and they focused on the same type of insects. This, in Koops's view, suggests the existence of an exclusively cultural distinction.
"Given the close evolutionary relationship we have with chimpanzees, any information we obtain on cultural diversification in the latter will undoubtedly provide us with clues as to how it occurs between neighboring human groups ," says Koops.
