Like Humans, Bumblebees and Chimpanzees Can Pass on Their Skills to Form ‘Cumulative Culture’

Humans and other animals have the ability to teach important skills to their contemporaries that allow for knowledge building across generations.

According to two new studies, bumblebees and chimpanzees are two animals who have the capability of learning skills so complex they would never have been able to master them alone — an ability scientists previously believed was unique to humans.

“Culture refers to behaviours that are socially learned and persist within a population over time. Increasing evidence suggests that animal culture can, like human culture, be cumulative: characterized by sequential innovations that build on previous ones,” the bumblebee study said.

“Cumulative culture” is the human capacity to build knowledge, skills and technology over time while improving upon them as they are taught to successive generations, reported AFP. It is a technique that is viewed as an essential part of humans’ dominance over their environment.

“Imagine that you dropped some children on a deserted island,” said Lars Chittka, co-author of the study on bees and a behavioral ecologist at London’s Queen Mary University, in a video accompaniment to the study, as AFP reported. “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.”

Earlier experiments had shown that some animals demonstrate “social learning,” where they figure out a skill through observation of individuals of their own species. But while some of the behaviors appeared to have been honed over time — such as the ability of chimpanzees to crack open nuts or the navigational skills of homing pigeons — it is hard for scientists to eliminate the possibility that these animals did not figure out how to accomplish the specific tasks on their own.

A research team from the United Kingdom looked at bumblebees to determine whether they had some of the characteristics of cumulative culture.

First they trained a group of “demonstrators” to perform a complicated skill that could be passed on to others.

They gave some of the bees a two-step puzzle box that involved pushing a blue tab followed by a red tab that released a sugary reward.

“This task is really difficult for bees because [during the first step] we are essentially asking them to learn to do something in exchange for nothing,” Alice Bridges, co-author of the study and a Ph.D. student at Queen Mary University, told AFP.

The bees initially attempted to only push the red tab without moving the blue tab first, then gave up.

In order to motivate them, the team placed the sugary prize at the end of the blue tab, then took the reward away gradually as they mastered the task.

The researchers then paired the demonstrator bees with “naive” bees unfamiliar with the process who watched their peers solve the puzzle.

Of the 15 new bees, five quickly solved the puzzle with no prize during the first step. Naive bees who were not taught how to obtain the treat were still not able to open the box after extended exposure for as long as 24 days.

Bridges said the team was “surprised” and thrilled when they saw the swift learning behavior.

They said the study was the first to observe an invertebrate species demonstrating cumulative culture.

“This finding challenges a common opinion in the field: that the capacity to socially learn behaviours that cannot be innovated through individual trial and error is unique to humans,” the study said.

The study, “Bumblebees socially learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone,” was published in the journal Nature.

The second study showed that humans’ closest living relatives — chimpanzees — also have the ability to learn from their contemporaries.

The Dutch-led research team set up a puzzle box to be solved by a semi-wild chimpanzee troupe at Zambia’s Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage (@chimfunshiwildlifeorphanage)

The task involved first retrieving a wooden ball, then holding a drawer open, putting the ball in and closing it to get a peanut at the end.

During the course of three months, 66 chimpanzees attempted but were not able to solve the puzzle.

The team then trained two demonstrator chimpanzees who showed their peers how to do it.

Within two months, 14 of the naive chimpanzees had mastered the puzzle. What’s more, the researchers discovered that the more often they observed the demonstrators, the faster they were able to solve it.

The study, “Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate,” was published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Bridges said both 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.”