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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

> Then the Dutch-led team of researchers trained two demonstrator chimpanzees to show the others how it was done.

> After two months, 14 "naive" chimps had mastered it.

I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”. It is showing that if humans train them, they can show others, which is different from humans learning a thing on their own, showing it to others, and then someone else using that as a foundation to discover something new building on that.

Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do.

I don’t think that is a novel or controversial finding. If you grow up around dogs, you know that one trained dog will help the other dogs learn.

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I, too, thought that chimps learning from each other was nothing new (Jared Diamond, etc).

Besides that: I haven't read either study, just the article, so who knows what were the actual claims, but…

The article opens with:

> chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own.

Which you object with:

> Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do.

and:

> I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”.

That reads a bit like rejecting evolution because we haven't fully replicated abiogenesis (yet).

Is "humans trained it to do" in "a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do" so important?

"cumulative culture" is also called "the ratchet effect" ... when you learn something from someone else and then improve on it and pass on the improvements, over and over and over across generations.

This is just learning, there was no ratchet effect.

How cumulative it is, is a fair question to ask. But I don't think animals passing on "culture" has anything to do with humans. Look at lion prides, where one pride has learned how to hunt elephants while another buffalo, and the young ones pick it up from the older generation. But put one member of one of those prides in the other's spot and they'll be clueless until they learn it from the others.

I agree completely. I think “passing on culture” in terms of training younger members to do some skill has been known for millennia. Dogs do it. Lions do it, I am sure all social animals do it to some extent.

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