Assuming that these claims are to some degree valid, this means that cultural transmission as an evolutionary process may arise in a wide variety of species given the right ecological and social conditions. 2003), Japanese macaques ( Huffman 1996) and capuchin monkeys ( Perry et al. Culture has been claimed, for example, for dolphins and whales ( Rendell & Whitehead 2001), New Caledonian crows ( Hunt & Gray 2003), chimpanzees ( Whiten et al. In recent years, researchers have claimed that a variety of different animal species have some form of culture or cultural transmission. Together, these unique processes of social learning and cooperation lead to humans’ unique form of cumulative cultural evolution. This difference results from the facts that (i) human social learning is more oriented towards process than product and (ii) unique forms of human cooperation lead to active teaching, social motivations for conformity and normative sanctions against non-conformity. Human culture, in contrast, has the distinctive characteristic that it accumulates modifications over time (what we call the ‘ratchet effect’). Chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species’ existing cognitive repertoire (what we call the ‘zone of latent solutions’) that are generated by founder effects, individual learning and mostly product-oriented (rather than process-oriented) copying. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well. Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms.

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