ABSTRACT
Major progress has recently been made in identifying an extensive range of traditions in great apes, suggesting they share with humans a distinctively heavy reliance on socially acquired information. This implies that selection pressures for the levels of social information transmission required have been operating for long periods of evolution encompassing our common ancestry. Yet, the adaptive significance of this approach to information acquisition remains to be explicitly studied. Here I examine three case studies where we can begin to examine the significance of ape traditions for fundamental biological outcomes concerning nutrition and health. First, there is evidence from West Africa that a regional tradition of nut cracking permits chimpanzees to survive a seasonal bottleneck in availability of their preferred food, fruit. Second, female chimpanzees have been found to rely on tool-based insectivory more than
males, apparently compensating for constraints on their vertebrate hunting capacity and accordingly prioritizing social learning of the skill earlier in development. Third, African apes exploit a variety of plant products for medicinal functions, and new experimental evidence suggests a role for social information in the acquisition process. Together, such discoveries begin to map the biological significance of patterns of social information transmission that characterize the great ape clade.
