We are destroying chimpanzee cultures
March 7, 2019 8:36 PM   Subscribe

Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss: By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives. "Imagine that an alien species landed on Earth and, through their mere presence, those aliens caused our art to vanish, our music to homogenize, and our technological know-how to disappear. That is effectively what humans have been doing to our closest relatives—chimpanzees."
It took a long time to convince skeptics that such cultures exist, but now we have plenty of examples of animals learning local traditions from one another. Some orangutans blow raspberries at each other before they go to bed. One dolphin learned to tail-walk from captive individuals and spread that trick to its own wild peers once released. Humpbacks and other whales have distinctive calls and songs in different seas. And chimps still stand out with “one of the most impressive cultural repertoires of nonhuman animals,” says Ammie Kalan, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

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Other animals are also likely losing their ancestral knowledge at our hands. When poachers kill an elephant matriarch, they also kill her memories of hidden water sources and anti-lion tactics, leaving her family in a more precarious place. When moose and bighorn sheep were exterminated from parts of the U.S., their generations-old awareness of the best migration routes died with them. Relocated individuals, who were meant to replenish the once-lost populations, didn’t know where to go, and so failed to migrate.

These discoveries mean that conservationists need to think about saving species in a completely new way—by preserving animal traditions as well as bodies and genes. “Instead of focusing only on the conservation of genetically based entities like species, we now need to also consider culturally based entities,” says Whiten, who made a similar argument last week in a paper co-written with many scholars of animal cultures.
posted by homunculus (9 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
I wonder sometimes what would happen on the Earth if humans stopped being a factor. How long would it take for another 'intelligent' species to come about? Would it be chimps? Would it even be a primate? Would it ever happen again before the Earth is done?
posted by downtohisturtles at 9:00 PM on March 7, 2019 [1 favorite]


This makes me very sad. I feel like the last decades of my life are going to be lived full of sorrow, from climate change to extinctions to the dissolution of the global political status quo which had seemed to keep things from getting too terribly violent.

I don't even know how humans are supposed to save animal traditions while saving animals by rescuing their genetics in captivity. Like, that feels like something even more difficult than resolving climate change, which could be done but which lacks the global collective will. One is science and changing of human habits. The other is relating to beings who share our planet but who are basically aliens to us and trying to teach them things we don't even really know about their species in ways we haven't even begun to grok.

I hate humans as an Earth-dwelling animal a lot these days.
posted by hippybear at 9:02 PM on March 7, 2019 [23 favorites]


Imagine that an alien species landed on Earth and, through their mere presence, those aliens caused our art to vanish, our music to homogenize, and our technological know-how to disappear.

Ummm....isn't this the premise of pretty much every breathless article about millenials???
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:15 PM on March 7, 2019 [4 favorites]


This all sounds on-Brand for Humanity (TM).

“Humanity: The relentless growth at the expense of everything people.”
posted by Construction Concern at 4:09 AM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


Before you mourn for the chimps, mourn first for the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other as-yet undiscovered proto-humans that we out-bred out of existence. And consider that, at the time, they would likely have out-bred our ancestors if they could.

Natural selection, it's a hell of a thing. So simple, even a caveman can do it.
posted by zaixfeep at 5:22 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


Well, no. What we're doing to populations of wildlife today - a mass extinction event that crosses nearly every taxonomic group - is pretty different from what happened to the Neanderthals and Denisovans. For one thing, there's lots of evidence that Homo sapiens sapiens interbred with all the other hominin species wandering around at the same time, and their genes persist in human populations to this day.

This is less like the Neanderthals - a species/subspecies with whom we were competing for a similar niche - and more like an indiscriminate asteroid.

This all makes me sad. I posted a similar realization about whales a few years back: "Losing a large number of individuals is a tragedy, but what happens when we lose an entire whale culture? What do we lose when we lose a way of life? Every culture, whale or otherwise, is its own solution to the problems of the environment in which it lives. With its extirpation, we lose the traditional knowledge of what it means to be a Caribbean whale and how to exploit the deep sea riches around the islands efficiently. And that cannot be recovered."


(And - apropos of nothing, the first author on this paper was doing her dissertation research in the same forest I was when I went to Cote d'Ivoire for the first time. She brought me a fun sized Snickers on my birthday (the same day three botflies emerged from my body) and it was the best thing in the entire world. )
posted by ChuraChura at 6:48 AM on March 8, 2019 [16 favorites]


I hate humans as an Earth-dwelling animal a lot these days.

I've felt like this for a very long time :(
posted by twilightlost at 7:10 AM on March 8, 2019


A materialist culture cannot recognize spiritual values like reverence for life.
posted by No Robots at 7:58 AM on March 8, 2019 [3 favorites]


Before you mourn for the chimps, mourn first for the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other as-yet undiscovered proto-humans that we out-bred out of existence.

YOU'RE NOT MY MOURNING SUPERVISOR
posted by Spathe Cadet at 9:39 AM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]


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