News of science:Unlike other animals, humans have a “cumulative culture” that enables us to build bigger, better and more powerful tools by sharing knowledge and learning from one another.
So researchers are reporting after a study that compared preschool-age children with chimps and capuchin monkeys when solving a puzzle. The children cooperated; the animals did not.
For the study, which appears in the current issue of Science, the researchers presented children, chimps and monkeys with a puzzle box that had to be solved in stages. Each stage provided a better reward (stickers for the children, fruit for the primates).
“Human children would teach other and motivate each other,” said an author of the study, Kevin Laland, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “We saw literally hundreds of cases where children would give other children stickers they’d received.”
Among the chimps and capuchins, by contrast, “we didn’t see one instance of sharing,” he said.
The scientists also wondered whether adult chimps and monkeys would help their young learn.
“But in fact, we found exactly the opposite, that parents were stealing their offspring’s food,” Dr. Laland said.
The study highlights one of the most important aspects of modern human society: the power of teaching. “Perhaps the most effective means through which you can cooperate is through teaching,” Dr. Laland said. In this way, a basic skill or piece of knowledge spreads through society, “and then one individual will refine it, and then that will be spread through the society, and then that process will be repeated.”
That may help explain why “we have particle accelerators and sophisticated medicine,” he continued. “When you think about all the component parts that go into it, the technology that we have now is way beyond anything any one individual could invent.”
News source:nytimes
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