http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2662610

Chimpanzee material culture implications for human evolution

The chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes, Pongidae) among all other living species, is our closest relation, with whom we last shared a common ancestor less than five million yearsago. These African apes make and use a rich and varied kit of tools. Of the primates, and even of the other Great Apes, they are the only consistent and habitual tool-users. Chimpanzees meet the criteria of working definitions of culture as originally devised for human beings in socio-cultural anthropology. They show sex differences inusing tools to obtain and to process a variety of plant and animal foods. The technological gap between chimpanzees andhuman societies living by foraging (hunter-gatherers) is surprisingly narrow, at least for food-getting. Different communities of chimpanzees have different tool-kits, and notall of this regional and local variation can be explained by the varied physical and biotic environments in which they live. Some differences are likely customs based onnon-functionally derived and symbolically encoded traditions. Chimpanzees serve as heuristic, referential models for the reconstruction of cultural evolution in apesand humans from an ancestral hominoid. However, chimpanzees are not humans, and key differences exist between them, though many of these apparent contrasts remain to beexplored empirically and theoretically.

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