New publication ‘Chimpanzee Culture in Context’

Wild chimpanzee in Guinea, West Africa. Photo credit: Dr. Kathelijne Koops

Chimpanzee culture in context

In a recent article, Kathelijne Koops and co-authors comment on the article “Blind alleys and fruitful pathways in the comparative study of cultural cognition” by Andrew Whiten in Physics of Life Reviews.

Whiten’s timely article evaluates the zone of latent solutions (ZLS) hypothesis, which has developed into a hot topic with recent new findings both from captive and natural settings. As such, a review of its usefulness is timely and helpful. In their comment, Koops and colleagues provide views based on their collective decades of field experience studying wild chimpanzee behaviour across Africa. The authors outline their thoughts on some of the issues raised by Whiten, address additional concerns, and present future directions.

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