Cultural panthropology

Cultural panthropology is a term used to describe the culture of chimpanzees and how it relates to evolutionary concepts.^[1]

As described in an abstract from a 2003 study by Andrew Whiten, Victoria Horner and Sarah Marshall-Pescini, cultural panthropology is "Culture, in the most basic sense of “tradition,” has been shown to exist in many species. There is more to the phenomenon of culture in humans, however, than the mere existence of traditions. Thus, rather than expecting that culture can be assigned to living or ancestral species in an all-or-none fashion, reconstruction of the evolution of this uniquely complex phenomenon is likely to depend on successfully teasing apart its components, which may have evolved in a somewhat mosaic fashion. In this paper, we dissect ten different aspects of human culture and offer evidence that most of them are manifested in chimpanzees, even if in limited ways, permitting inferences about the cultural profile of our common ancestor. The aspects of culture examined include large-scale patterns of behavioral variation across populations, the mechanisms available for social transmission, and cultural contents. The contrasts thus drawn for humans and chimpanzees offer a framework for cultural comparisons between other taxa from the past and present."^[2][3]

References

1. ^ http://client.vediamo.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/comportamentoanimali-data/b_documents/pubblicazioni/cultural_panthropology.pdf
2. ^ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/evan.10107/abstract
3. ^ http://www.citeulike.org/user/larios/article/1001835