The Secret Culture of the Apes | Free Documentary Nature

the chimpanzee is the human's closest living relative 99 of our genes are the same and even our behavior has more in common than scientists used to think every time chimpanzees were seen to do something which people used to think only humans could do there was an immediate reaction that this can't be so what's the difference between humans and chimpanzees and how big is that difference i take it as a given that humans are different you just need to look around you and look at the artifacts and the language we're talking and the television where whatever and i take it as uncontroversial that humans have some special characteristics his culture exclusive to humans or do the apes also have culture when you think of human culture of course you think of houses computers people who write operas that kind of thing but the average human can't construct a computer or compose an opera so what kind of culture do apes have scientists are trying to answer that question and definitive more if this experiment works it will definitely cause a sensation me the african tropical belt dense rainforest for decades humans have been encroaching on it and reducing the number of great apes a hundred years ago several million chimpanzees lived here now there are fewer than three hundred thousand the kibala national park in uganda is one of the last refuges of the east african chimpanzee [Applause] more than 1200 of them live here [Music] from the university of new shotel in switzerland is on his way to the 50-strong kanyawara group which has been accustomed to humans for more than 20 years gruber wants to find out if the chimpanzee's actions are genetically determined or do they learn their behavior that would be a first indication of culture to answer this question the french scientist is taking his experimental research to the jungle we've chosen this path because we know that the chimpanzees are under a tree down there and we also know that they build their nests on the right over the idea is to place the tree trunk where the chimpanzees are most likely to protect the apes gruber has to wear a mask and gloves this is the first stage of an experiment in which he hopes to discover how the chimpanzees react to a new challenge he's filled a deep narrow hole in the tree trunk with honey the apes will not be able to reach this delicacy simply with their fingers the comb will also fend off the insects that will try to reach the honey the hole has to be completely covered and now we must get out of here the chimpanzees could appear at any moment with their experiments gruber and his colleagues want to bridge the gap between pure observation in the field and laboratory experiments our starting point is a classical ethological one like the classical behaviorist tin bergen and lawrence we're trying to describe the animal in its natural habitat however you never know about the causality of observational data what causes what so we try to recreate the natural situation in our experiments while maintaining control of the stimuli that way we know when we supply a stimulus that it can only be that specific stimulus which triggered the behavior the experiments in the field are absolutely necessary but nature intervenes a horde of army ants cuts off the chimpanzee's path to the site of the experiment shortly afterwards a swarm of bees discovers the honey researchers in the field are often thwarted by obstacles of this kind the first to approach the trunk is 40-year-old tongo with her child she has spotted the honeycomb [Music] but the bees interfere with gruber's experiment the researcher was expecting a different result was this a failure [Music] yes because they didn't bring any tools it's especially disappointing because i've known tongo for two or three years and she's always used tools on the other hand we now know that the chimpanzees have discovered the location and know that there's honey here when they return tomorrow they'll definitely look to see if there's any more honey evening is approaching and the chimpanzees move on t-boat gruber decides to have another go in the morning that's field work for you gruber spends more than four months a year here with the chimpanzees here in east africa chimpanzees split from the human branch of the hamanoidai family about seven million years ago that is the point on which t-boat groomer and klaus super bowlers research is concentrating the mensch is iron cigar humans are uniquely human chimpanzees are uniquely chimpanzees but we want to understand how this happened how these species became the way they are it's uncontested that we share an ancestor with the chimpanzees who lived about seven million years ago what we want to discover is what happened in those millions of years that led to the present day human and what led to the chimpanzees becoming the way they are yet [Music] 5 30 the following morning let's do it ruber and his assistants make a second attempt now they can only wait [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] daylight reveals that the animals are inventive they're making pestles out of sticks tongo's son tuba grabs a tool [Music] it seems quite natural to him it wasn't always natural to humans it was very very exciting when i first saw a chimpanzee picking a piece of grass and using it to fish termites from their underground nest and it was even more exciting when i saw him reach out and pick a leafy twig and strip off the leaves because that was the beginning of tool making and at that time this is 1960 we humans were defined as man the tool maker and so lewis leakey my great mentor he sent a telegram back saying ah now we have to redefine man redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as humans [Music] jane goodall the mother of chimpanzee research her observations in the tanzanian gombe stream national park caused a ferrari [Music] but scientists are still divided as to whether the use of tools proves the chimpanzees have a culture similar to that of humans the researchers here in uganda hope to make a significant contribution to answering that question when you present a chimpanzee with an experimental task he'll draw on his cultural knowledge just as humans do to solve the problem this one is very simple to get honey out of a hole we see that chimpanzees use sticks to reach the honey a moment ago we saw special doing that however when we look at another group for instance the sunset group in the budongo forest about 180 kilometers from here we see that the apes there use leaves the field experiment with the cabala chimpanzees is only the first piece of the puzzle in answering the question do chimpanzees acquire their knowledge genetically or culturally to complete the jigsaw t-boat gruber drives 180 kilometers to the northeast to the budongo forest there are about 700 chimpanzees living in this nature reserve about the size of hamburg the same species as in kibala in a very similar habitat the forest is famous for its wealth of species including primates such as the red-tailed monkey [Music] the blue monkey and the black and white collar bus [Music] an interesting area for researchers from all over the world who have set up camp in the middle of the bush the famous primatologist and psychologist klaus tsubabula is here to see how gruber's research is going professor tsuba bhule is supervising gruber's studies at the swiss university of nurshitel there are strict rules in the camp new arrivals have to wear a surgical mask to prevent transmitting germs when making contact with the chimpanzees in a clearing near the camp the honey experiment is set up again this time under a fig tree and it's not long before the 80 members of the sonso group discover the tree with its ripe fruit and the experiment beneath it [Music] once again they take the honeycomb which is easy and at first ignore the actual experiment but then the moment t-boat groomer has been waiting for although the budongo chimpanzees live in the same conditions as the apes 180 kilometers away they don't think of using a stick as a tool to reach the food the experiments show that their cultural behavior is not a direct result of the environment the difference in behavior cannot be explained in terms of a problem present in the one group their cultural knowledge to solve a new [Music] problem the apes appear to pass on their knowledge is this another indication that chimpanzees have culture [Music] tibot spends the evening viewing the video material he's been gathering for months it shows that the animals in badango fall back on a tried and tested chimpanzee method of soaking up honey they chew on a bunch of leaves and make a kind of sponge out of them [Music] this is entirely different from the chimpanzees in kebala [Music] the same problem two solutions in budongo the chimpanzees soak up the honey with a leaf sponge in kibala they use a stick why is the problem tackled so differently in badongo un here the animals didn't know how to solve the problem most of them tried using their fingers and then gave up then a few came up with an ad hoc solution the most obvious thing to do was to use their sponge technique sponges are used by all groups of chimpanzees to drink water but it was presumably a new invention to use this technique for honey extraction to solve if sharing knowledge is a sign of culture these experiments provide clear evidence of various chimpanzee cultures and they prove that the animals use their cultural knowledge to meet new challenges 6 thousand kilometers away lies the german town of leipzig [Music] christophe bush one of the world's leading animal researchers heads the primatology department at the max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology here together with some 70 other scientists professor bush is conducting research into the great apes you'll seldom find him in his office most of the time he's out in the field professor bush was one of the first to postulate that there are varying cultures among chimpanzees he became alert to the question when he compared the ant fishing of chimpanzees in the thai national park in ivory coast with similar activities observed by jane goodall in tanzania four thousand kilometers away that led him to his first simple definition of culture [Music] definition i think the definition everyone can accept is culture is the specific behavior of a group that is learned by the other members here for instance we see chimpanzees fishing for ants this is the technique used by the chimpanzees in thai national park they only use small sticks and poke them immediately into their mouths to eat the ants this is characteristic of the thai culture which is very different from the culture of the chimpanzees in tanzania there they use long sticks and both hands it's the perfect demonstration of behavior aimed at the same pickings ants that are found all over africa and build similar nests everywhere yet the chimpanzees use varying techniques which in fact define them socially [Music] and professor bush found corroborating evidence in the way chimpanzees crack nuts [Music] here we see very clearly how a chimpanzee cracks a nut he holds a stone in his right hand the anvil is a tangle of roots he uses to crack the cola nuts now he places the nut on the anvil which he's previously cleaned hammers it and extracts the kernel which he eats this behavior has only been observed in southwest ivory coast although the nuts and the chimpanzees are found everywhere in west and central africa so it clearly shows that this is cultural behavior in no way genetically determined because some populations don't display this behavior at all burs and his colleagues made an even more surprising discovery various groups within the same habitat use different tools to crack nuts [Music] some do it with stones others with wooden hammers [Music] if then neighboring chimpanzee groups apply various solutions to the same problem are these differing cultures comparable to human cultures the fact for instance that some humans eat with a knife and fork others with chopsticks and others with their fingers [Music] one of professor bush's colleagues at the max planck institute in leipzig the psychologist michael tomasello says no tomasello heads the department of comparative and developmental psychology he and his team examined the great apes and leipzig zoo's orangutan land the world's largest enclosure of great apes all four species live together here under one roof orangutans gorillas bonobos and chimpanzees [Music] the research conducted here is widely respected internationally [Music] professor tomasello also speaks of culture and connection with apes but he says there's a vital difference from human culture our culture has a cumulative nature that um new advances everyone gets them and they stay in place until there's another advance and then we all get that and so you get artifacts like a computer or a television that have a history that they have a they have a history where you can say what you can show where they were simple and then a new innovation and they get more complex and another innovation and they get more complex and the uh the new people coming to these artifacts or ways of doing things they don't they don't have to know anything about the history they just get the new one okay and they learn how to use it and then they maybe they do something new tomasello speaks of the carjack effect meaning that human culture is built on the experiences and knowledge of our ancestors he says that apes on the other hand don't have this capacity they have to wait for individuals to make new inventions and have new ideas and can't develop the achievements of previous generations but christoph bush's most recent observations in gabon west africa contradict tomasello's thesis burst discovered that many animals in the luango national park are interested in the honey produced by bees in underground nests each species whether elephant or honey badger has its own method usually brutal of breaking open the cone [Music] chimpanzees on the other hand have developed a sophisticated technique and refined it step by step especially with regard to nests in trees the chimpanzees have refined their technique step by step they've added two additional sticks to their technique of using just one little stick the first stick they added is like the one back there it's thicker and is used as a kind of pencil [Music] in that case the chimpanzees first opened the hive with a pestle and then use a second stick with a hard end to bore a hole into the interior of the hive and open the deep chambers then they use a third stick like the one you see the chimpanzees have arrived from a one-stick technique via a two-stick technique at a three-stick there are three cumulative steps that have led to this sophisticated tool technique step by step they've added one stick after another christoph bush and michael tomasello two of the most widely respected researchers hold contradictory opinions about the similarities and differences between humans and apes it appears that the concept of culture is the divisive issue i found you know over my many years it's now more than 50 and every time chimpanzees were seen to do something which people used to think only humans could do there was an immediate reaction that this can't be and it seems to me that there was always a body of people who were desperate to prove that well we're different in this way and we're different in that and culture was one of them and we can't talk about chimpanzees having culture because humans have culture and that makes us different what is true is that because of our language we've been able to really go very far along the path of cultural evolution this is the direction class superbula is pursuing in budongo for years he's been researching the communication and vocalization capabilities of apes with an experiment in the field he hopes to establish to what extent apes can communicate among themselves he will play them recordings of their own sounds in the infrastructure with this experiment i am specifically trying to find out whether chimpanzees can use their sounds their vocalizations intentionally or not that's to say whether their calls are simply expressions of emotion or whether they use them strategically to inform other members of the group selectively is going to play the greeting calls of high-ranking companions to fig eating chimpanzees scientists call this a playback test okay chuck's nothing go ready can you play please okay individual animals in the tree react immediately to the apparent approach of high-ranking chimpanzees with what are termed food calls the food is the food calls are not simply a reaction to the food as such they provide information to other members of the group who are socially important to them evidence of verbal communication of a language with semantics and grammar the calls have meaning there are primitive semantics the animals are able to inform others when they consider this necessary that is an important aspect of language but so far we haven't found much grammar you could say certain building blocks are there others are missing in that sense of course they don't have human language they have ape language to which there are certain parallels but also certain differences to discover more about the complexity of the apes language the researchers advance deeper into the bush they hope to find out whether chimpanzees understand not only their own language but also to some extent foreign languages on their journey they stumble across evidence of illegal logging a mahogany tree has recently been chopped down scientists often discover such practices another reason to press ahead quickly with their research this is your announcement it's a source of food when you chop down a tree the animals lose another fruit tree the second aspect is the danger of disease people come into the forest and stay here for several days and throw their garbage around and that also presents a danger to the animals because they climb around in this area so of course we're unhappy when we see something like this kind of foreign each year uganda loses two percent of its forests through logging destroying this provisional timber yard will hardly make any difference i'm afraid that in 50 years scientists like me will just feel like crying chimpanzees in the wild will have disappeared [Music] by then one or two additional populations will have been studied and it will have been confirmed in those cases as well that there were further new behavioral patterns to be studied it will be terribly frustrating as a scientist i'm seriously worried that we shall never be able to answer the question of the relationship between humans and chimpanzees honestly and fully the researchers are under time pressure and they still have many questions last superbula and his team hope to answer one of them now can chimpanzees really understand the signs of other ape species and use them for their own purposes another playback test is set up we have we have a group of chimpanzees back here feeding and now we're going to play them the alarm call of the black and white columbus monkeys the alarm calls vary depending on what columbus monkeys see when attacked by a chimpanzee they give a chimpanzee alarm sound when attacked by an eagle they give an eagle alarm sound we're going to play that now jackson will play it and i'll go back to the group and try to film their reactions first the chimpanzees hear the long alarm call that the columbus monkeys give when they want to warn the others that they've spotted an eagle jackson jackson yes yes push play now please chimpanzees simply ignore it then the second version a shorter chimpanzee alarm call jackson jackson can you play now immediately the animals set off to take part in the exciting hunt they must have learned the meanings of these various calls in that sense there are some similarities to language acquisition which is of course a cultural however we don't know precisely how this learning takes place whether it's an individual experience when the chimpanzee sees the columbus with an eagle and hears the call or if he learns it socially for instance by observing the mother's reaction when she encounters certain events there is still work to be done but it's already clear that apes have some kind of understanding of language how exactly it works still has to be [Music] researched on the way back to the camp scientists experience something far more dramatic than any of their experiments the chimpanzees have discovered a callibus monkey in the treetops they prey on these little primates [Music] even the field researchers who are here every day seldom witness this kind of hunting the chimpanzees hunt down the colibus together and kill it no easy task for a great egg a chimpanzee can fall get bitten they have to know a lot i think the less experienced animals probably watch the experienced ones and learn from them [Music] a second columbus monkey in the undergrowth is injured the chimpanzee baby is interested but frightened to approach it alone [Applause] an experienced female finishes off the monkey the baby chimp watches closely i think just killed it [Music] another aspect of the chimpanzee's behavior interests the researchers the hunting of the columbus monkey appears to mean a kind of cultural revolution in the badongo forest [Music] for more first 10 years there was hardly any hunting activity here now and then the chimpanzees hunted opportunistically they caught a monkey when it was stupid enough to approach but there wasn't any coordinated active hunting the personality structure of a single chimpanzee can apparently influence the development of an entire group further evidence of culture [Music] in germany the psychologist jana ur from berlin's free university is studying the great apes with her colleague jenny colar at berlin zoo [Music] they have been investigating the animals individual personality structures for some years currently they are studying a group of five chimpanzees at the zoo together with her team jana ur has developed a new methodological approach to measure classify and empirically compare behavioral patterns the researchers spend up to six hours a day at the zoo observing each animal and its interaction with others continuously for 20 minutes every reaction every movement every approach we observe the apes every day four weeks at a time and a variety of behavioral aspects that we've compiled systematically from research publications to provide the most complete picture possible we observe how each individual relates to the others in its group and then we analyze how the individuals differ from each other in their behavior we make long-term analyses that don't just reflect specific fluctuations during the day we focus on various behavioral areas and compare individuals for instance whose physical activities are more pronounced than those of the other chimpanzees she runs around more she's more active than the others she's also less aggressive than the average chimpanzee we've observed we take the many varied behavioral patterns that an individual displays and compare each individual with the others in the population to see how that individual is different from the rest [Music] jana doesn't simply rely on her own observations she also takes account of what the keepers notice they care for the animals every day specially developed software records each individual animal and keepers fill in detailed questionnaires [Music] the result is a profile like lily's jana or has compiled nearly 270 of these profiles with data from 25 zoos so far one of her preliminary conclusions each individual personality can be significant for the development of a group even for an entire species there are various ways in which a chimpanzee can deal with a termite mound to get to particular the differences are not part of their nature which shows that they must be techniques which one of them invented otherwise all individuals would do it naturally and that's the point maybe some individuals were especially inventive perhaps less wary of inspecting an unknown object and discovered that it made an excellent lunch so we can safely assume that it was these differences that played a vital role behavioral patterns specific to the individual leading to the development of culture in this respect chimpanzees are similar to humans i think the fact that chimpanzees are different from one from another is really very important and i've watched infants and usually it's infants because their behavior is very flexible you know and they're always playing and they're poking around and investigating things and i've seen an infant perform some behavior which could theoretically turn into a new kind of tool use and because they're all different and some are more investigate more you know persistently than others it's this kind of difference between individuals where you'll get one infant suddenly discovering a new kind of tools but how is this knowledge this new culture passed on from one generation to the next is it active learning as in humans or is it simply imitation is this the fundamental difference between humans and chimpanzees the main difference between human culture and great ape culture is that in humans the transmission process is much more faithful what the child is getting is much more similar to what the adult is doing and wants them to learn and because the adults are actively teaching it and making sure the children learn what they want them to and the children are not just picking up useful information they're conforming to what the adults want them to learn michael tomasello bases his thesis on research with great apes living in captivity but in the wild christophe bursch has observed a very different phenomenon it's very difficult to study the precise mechanisms of social learning in the wild but what we see very clearly is that the baby apes are very keen to watch their mother and imitate what she does they spend a great deal of time doing that we've also observed that the mother actively stimulates her child to crack nuts by presenting it with half cracked nuts or hell nuts that have to be cracked she tailors this exactly to the child's capabilities and the stimulus she provides depends on the child's age [Music] and busch has gone a step further he wanted to discover how old this tradition of nutcracking is [Music] to answer this question he set up an interdisciplinary team together with archaeologists in west africa he searched for traces of chimpanzees in the past [Music] here you see me taking part in excavations we made in thai national park to discover how long for how many generations chimpanzees have cracked nuts uh caslin is that not just chimpanzees but also humans use the forest initially we uncovered a human layer from the stone age this layer we discovered another layer with stones we were able to prove that these were indeed stones used by chimpanzees 4 000 years ago that's the equivalent of 220 chimpanzee generations so chimpanzee culture also has a history back to uganda in wadongo the decisive experiment is being prepared class superbula and thibaut gruber are hoping to find the final piece of the jigsaw they want to prove that chimpanzees learn socially [Music] this time the experiment is more complicated bula and gruber are searching for knight the daughter of the top-ranking female nambi they think she's very bright the researchers hope to make her fish for honey with a stick instead of a sponge and then see if she passes on this knowledge to the others we want to isolate a particular animal so that the others don't learn the technique at the same time don't with this kind of experiment it's especially important that only the selected animal in this case night is separated from the group that way we only enable her to learn the new technique technique when she's finally mastered the technique we'll repeat the experiment but this time in a social context so that the other animals can observe her using the new technique if the others had already learned the technique the experiment would of course be useless [Music] will knight lay the foundation for a new cultural form among the budongo chimpanzees with her idea if so the researchers would have proved in the wild that culture is acquired socially they have to proceed very cautiously the apes mustn't be able to see them setting up the experiment once again a tree trunk is filled with honey the difference this time is that the researchers also supply the new technique a poking stick is thrust into the hole to give knight the right idea if she uses the stick her mother the head of the clan namby will probably pass on this knowledge to the other members of the group the others usually follow the high-ranking animals [Music] for the scientists the decisive moment is approaching knight has discovered the trunk with the honey [Music] however she doesn't recognize the purpose of the stick she licks the honey off it and throws it away initially the experiment has failed but the researchers don't give up they'll be patient for another few weeks if we get a positive result with this experiment we'll help answer the question of whether animals have culture there are still critics even among our colleagues who strongly criticize the chimpanzee culture theory and accuse us of not having any conclusive evidence that these behavioral differences we observe can be interpreted as culture if we can show in the wild that the animals learn artificially introduced behavior socially from one another and then apply it afterwards we'll close this gap and finally end the debate aintly to aim to give you research into the culture of the great apes is still in the early stages but with each new detail that emerges the chimpanzee appears to get closer to us however it depends on humans whether our closest relatives will survive in a secure environment [Music] you

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full documentary, HD documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), nature documentary, Free Documentary Nature, Nature, Wildlife, Wildlife Documentary, Animals, Animal Documentary, Apes, Secrets of the Apes, Secret Culture of the Apes, Dr Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall, chimpanzee, africa wildlife, Africa, Great Ape, Monkeys, Chimp, Hominidae, Bonobo, Closest Relative of Man, evolution, natural history, human evolution, human, Human after all

Id: k1My8pv4ItY

Length: 51min 44sec (3104 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021