Similar to humans, bees and chimps can pass on their skills to one another
One of humanity's crowning talents is called "cumulative culture" — our ability to build up skills over time, improving them as they pass down through generations but two studies show other animals can too.
The authors of the bee research said it was the first demonstration of cumulative culture in an invertebrate. / Photo: AFP
Bumblebees and chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own, an ability previously thought to be unique to humans, two studies have found.
"Imagine that you dropped some children on a deserted island," said Lars Chittka, a behavioural ecologist at the Queen Mary University of London and co-author of the bee study.
"They might — with a bit of luck — survive, but they would never know how to read or to write because this requires learning from previous generations," he said in a video published on Wednesday with the study in the journal Nature.
This ability to transfer abilities no individual could learn by themselves is credited with helping drive humanity's rise and domination of the world.
Previous experiments have demonstrated that some animals are capable of what is known as social learning but it is difficult to rule out that they could not have worked out how to achieve feats by themselves until now:
Bridges said the studies "can't help but fundamentally challenge the idea that cumulative culture is this extremely complex, rare ability that only the very 'smartest' species e.g. humans are capable of".
Bees solving the puzzle
The first step was training a crack squad of "demonstrators" to do a complex skill that they could later teach to others.
In the lab, some bees were given a two-step puzzle box. They were tasked with first pushing a blue tab, then a red tab to release the sugary prize at the end.
The demonstrators were then paired up with some new "naive" bees, who watched the demonstrators solve the puzzle before having a go themselves. Five of the 15 naive bees swiftly completed the puzzle.
Alex Thornton, a professor of cognitive evolution at the UK's University of Exeter not involved in the research, acknowledged that it was a small sample size.
"But the point is clear — the task was exceptionally hard to learn alone, yet some bees could solve it through social learning," he wrote in a comment piece in Nature.
2. Chimp off the old block
Chimpanzees — our closest living relatives — also seem to possess this talent, according to a separate study in Nature Human Behaviour.
The puzzle box for a troupe of semi-wild chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia was a little more difficult. It involved retrieving a wooden ball, holding open a drawer, slotting in the ball then closing it to release the peanut prize.
Over three months, 66 chimps tried and failed to solve the puzzle.
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.
Thornton said the research again showed how "people habitually overestimate their abilities relative to those of other animals".
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