Chimpanzee Culture Wars

Book excerpt: Decades later, starting in the 1980s, Japanese cultural primatology was given a second look as Euro-American primatologists began to debate amongst themselves the question of whether Homo sapiens is the only cultural animal. In the most recent chapter of this controversy, field researchers such as the Swiss primatologist Christophe Boesch have accused experimental psychologists such as Michael Tomasello of underestimating and even denying the capacity of chimpanzees for culture because they limit their studies to captive animals, brought up under cognitively debilitating conditions and tested in laboratory settings bound to favor human test subjects with whom the animals are compared. These controversies raise serious questions about what sort of laboratory culture is best for the study of primate cognition. .