"Culture requires more than just a mother-infant bond, but also extensive social contact, and orangutans are at the low end of the sociability spectrum," said van Schaik. To explore the possibility of culture in orangutans, The Leakey Foundation sponsored in February 2002 a gathering of orangutan researchers from throughout the world to correlate their data.
Besides van Schaik, co-authors included Marc Ancrenaz of the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project, Gwendolyn Borgen of Duke, Birute Galdikas of Simon Fraser University and Orangutan Foundation International, Cheryl Knott of Harvard University, Ian Singleton of the Sumatran Orangutan conservation Programme, Akira Suzuki of Kyoto University, Sri Suci Utami of Universitas International in Jararta, Indonesia, and Michelle Merrill of Duke.
"It was an open-ended exercise, in which we looked at each other's videos and other data from our own observation sites," said van Schaik. "We looked for behaviors that were different among the different groups.
"While we were by no means certain that we would come up with any evidence for cultural variability, we ultimately identified 24 behaviors that likely represent cultural variants. Frankly, we were all rather giddy at the end, when we realized what had come out of our data."
According to van Schaik, the researchers are acutely aware that such differences might be nothing more than the animals' adaptation to varying habitats, without social transmission.
"However, we saw that habitat did not have a significant impact
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Contact: Dennis Meredith
dennis.meredith@duke.edu
919-681-8054
Duke University
2-Jan-2003