Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
Curr Biol. 2012 Apr 24;22(8):727-31. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.006. Epub 2012 Apr 12.
Cultural transmission is a key component of human evolution. Two of humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees and orangutans, have also been argued to transmit behavioral traditions across generations culturally [1-3], but how much the process might resemble the human process is still in large part unknown. One key phenomenon of human cultural transmission is majority-biased transmission: the increased likelihood for learners to end up not with the most frequent behavior but rather with the behavior demonstrated by most individuals. Here we show that chimpanzees and human children as young as 2 years of age, but not orangutans, are more likely to copy an action performed by three individuals, once each, than an action performed by one individual three times. The tendency to acquire the behaviors of the majority has been posited as key to the transmission of relatively safe, reliable, and productive behavioral strategies [4-7] but has not previously been demonstrated in primates.
文化传播是人类进化的关键组成部分。人类的两个近亲，黑猩猩和猩猩，也被认为在文化上通过世代相传传递行为传统[1-3]，但这个过程与人类过程有多少相似之处在很大程度上仍是未知的。人类文化传播的一个关键现象是多数偏向传播：学习者最终更有可能获得的行为不是最常见的行为，而是大多数个体所表现出的行为。在这里，我们表明，黑猩猩和 2 岁的人类儿童，但不是猩猩，更有可能复制由三个个体各执行一次的动作，而不是由一个个体执行三次的动作。获得多数行为的倾向被认为是相对安全、可靠和富有成效的行为策略传播的关键[4-7]，但以前在灵长类动物中没有得到证明。
